A tool to find coverage faster and provide employees flexibility in their schedules? That’s genius. Here’s how you can find the right people to fill shifts with the UniFocus ShiftGenius scheduling and shift filling feature.
ShiftGenius, winner of the 2021 Tech Ovation Award, makes managers’ lives easier, helps employees reach a better-balanced schedule for their lives, and helps employers stand out in the labor market by addressing the trend towards more flexibility. Managers can send open shifts – whether a single shift or the whole schedule – to employees, who can then pick up shifts or create their own schedule.
The gig economy (and its flexible schedules) has grown as it puts people in the driver's seat when it comes to building their schedules. Anticipating that the gig economy will represent more than half the labor market by 2023, ShiftGenius is a standard UniFocus feature to better equip organizations to provide schedule flexibility to their employees.
UniFocus already offers a feature for finding immediate coverage when an employee is absent, but ShiftGenius builds on that concept for all open shifts, even before the schedule is published.
ShiftGenius is smarter than a general blast – it allows managers to target whom they want to send the shift(s) to, based on their own rankings or groupings (like seniority and skills), cross-utilize within the property or across properties, all while providing visibility into availability, overtime, and other work rules. The UniFocus environment is real-time, meaning that employees can’t pick up shifts that violate work rules and all updates are live throughout the system immediately.
If an employee is absent – whether they are sick, there’s a no-show, etc. – managers can use ShiftGenius to send out that shift for immediate coverage. UniFocus partners who enable employee callouts in the app are already using a similar feature. But with ShiftGenius, all UniFocus partners can fill shifts urgently with less admin work.
Though UniFocus forecasts incorporate numerous sources of data to anticipate demand, unforeseen events do pop up, causing a sudden increase in volume. We’ve all been there. Scrambling to add people to already scheduled shifts because a sports tournament changed locations at the last minute, or whatever change came up. With ShiftGenius, managers can add open shifts to the already published schedule and send them out to employees to get them filled quickly.
A 2019 study found that 80% of workers in the U.S. would choose a job which offered flexible working over a job that didn't. ShiftGenius can be used to allow employees to choose their schedule, while still covering the business needs and executing your service expectations.
For organizations to feel confident implementing flexible schedules, they must first ensure that their schedules meet the needs of the business. UniFocus is uniquely equipped to provide a feature like ShiftGenius because it is informed by an intelligent labor management system that leverages accurate, multi-variable forecasts and specific customer needs to automatically generate optimized schedules that ensure quality service. This makes UniFocus the only provider that can implement flexible scheduling options without risking service quality and significantly increasing manual admin tasks.
Everything in the UniFocus environment is updated real-time, so no manual updates to phase cards, schedules, etc. are needed. Managers have visibility into potential overtime costs when approving shift coverage. All Time & Attendance data is real-time, meaning that employees can’t pick up shifts that violate work rules and all updates are live throughout the system immediately.
Instead of spending time reaching out to employees to fill a shift by phone, text, social media, and more, without visibility into availability or hours, managers can instead see the important data they need for making the right decision and spend time communicating with the right group of employees. The organization is further protected by ensuring that the employee selections do not violate work rules, like breaks, etc., without the heavy tracking burden on the managers.
With employee shift selection, you can use the entirety of the labor pool available to you. Fill your shifts and schedule by cross-utilizing within the property and across properties. When sending out a shift, you can choose whom it’s available to.
The gig economy has boomed, primarily because of the way that it allows workers to manage their schedules in a way that suits their lives. Prior to the pandemic, Gallup estimated that 36% of workers in the US had some type of gig work arrangement. The pandemic has increased the number of people turning to gig economy, especially with schools closing, because of lost jobs and an immediate need to manage schedules differently to account for childcare and other changing demands.
Why does this matter to you? The gig economy is expected to make up more than half of the labor market by 2023 (Forbes). Offering the benefits of the gig economy allows operators to compete for labor as the nature of the workforce evolves.
The feature-packed UniFocus mobile app gets even more powerful with this feature. Employees can select and manage their shifts right from their phones. This is an additional feature both in the web version and in the highly rated UniFocus’s mobile app.
ShiftGenius will be a standard feature for all 10.4 and later versions. If you are already a UniFocus Labor Management or Time & Attendance partner and you want to be the first to get this new feature, contact your Partner Relationship Manager to get on our waitlist! ⬡