Deputy is great for letting your team know when their shifts are, clocking in and out for their shifts, allowing them to submit unavailability or leave requests and even swapping shifts with one another.
But what happens when you are busy managing your team and the schedule doesn't go to plan on the day?
For this example, let's assume a team member has not shown up for a shift. How can Deputy help?
1. Manager gets notified
You can set up an optional manager notification to let you know when a scheduled team member is late to clock on.
If it's out of character for this team member to not show up for work, you might like to send them a News feed message or call them up to check everything is OK.
2. Swap the shift
If the missing team member is definitely not coming in to work and you already know exactly which team member will replace them you can open today's schedule and click on the shift to change the name of the team member that is working.
In this example, we know Sally is ready to take over Binny's shift. Don't forget to hit Save and also Publish the shift.
3. Make the shift Open
If the missing team member is not coming to work and you aren't sure who is available to cover the shift, rather than call around to your team individually to ask them to work, you can make the shift Open and invite any recommended team members to claim the shift.
Go to today's schedule open the shift and change the name of the team member working to Open.
Don't forget to hit Save and then also Publish the shift.
Now, a push notification will be sent to your team members who have downloaded the Deputy mobile app and the first person to respond will be able to claim the shift. You may also like to read Open shifts with approval.
4. Publishing updates
When making last-minute changes to the schedule, you still need to publish shift changes for them to take effect.
In this case, it makes sense to only Publish updates so that only team members whose shifts have changed will be notified.
If you select Publish all, then all team members will be notified and this may cause confusion for team members who already have received their shifts previously and don't have any changes.
5. Journal
Depending on your organisational needs it may be worthwhile to create a journal for the employee that didn't show up for their shift to record the steps you took as a manager to contact them or perhaps record the reason why they missed their shift.