Rotageek has a Gaps feature at the top of the Scheduler to indicate that a shift needs to be filled but is not yet assigned to a team member.
Gaps helps you to identify an employee who is available to work, and you can send notifications to your team asking if they would like to take on the extra shift.
Gaps can be used in one store/location, or across multiple locations within your business. This enables you to draw on employees from other branches to provide cover when required.
How to Use Gaps
Add your unassigned shifts to the gaps row in the scheduler, just as you would add a shift to the Scheduler itself. You can either create a new gap or choose from the list of custom shifts. If the shift requires a specific task you can specify this here too.
If you have more than one unassigned shift on a particular day, you can add multiple gaps in the same box.
Once you've added your unassigned shifts to the gaps row, the next step is to choose which employee you want to give the shift to. There are three different ways you can choose which employee you want.
1) Use the scheduler to select an employee
To see a list of available employees on the scheduler, click the gap shift and click assign. A module will open and will show the available employees.
You can select more than one location in the location dropdown.
If an employee is greyed out, it means they either have a shift or leave at the same time of the shift, or do not have the skill set needed for the specific tasks on the shift.
To help you decide who you want to give the shift to, your employees' scheduled hours and contracted hours are displayed if you hover over the information button.
Once you've chosen the team member, select them and press assign. This will move the shift out of the gaps row and add the shift to their rota in draft form. To finalise the allocation, click the approve button in the top right corner.
2) Preview which employees can take the shift
If you'd rather see this in a visual way looking down the scheduler, when you open the gap modal select preview bottom right.
This will then highlight blue + boxes at the bottom right of anyone who can take the specific shift.
Once you select the blue + the shift will drop out of the gaps row and be assigned to your selected employee in draft format. To finalise the allocation, click the approve button in the top right corner.
3) Send a Gaps Notification to Available Employees
Instead of just allocating the gap shift to an available employee of the manager's choice, managers can notify their team about the unassigned shift to see who'd like to take on the extra hours. This is done by sending a gap notification.
Press tools > send gap shifts. This launches a modal box where you can decide which gap shifts to send.
Select the gap shifts you want to send, and amend the location drop-down if you'd like to send it to more than one location, then click next.
This will then show you all of the gaps you have decided to send out.
Now you can choose who you want to send the gap shifts too. You can either select all, or look in more detail and select individual employees to send the gap too. Remember, gaps take skills into consideration so some employees may not show. Once you've chosen your employees click send.
Selected team members will now be able to see the available shift via the employee mobile app. If they are interested in taking it they can request the shift.
When an employee has expressed interest in working a gap shift, x requested will appear at the bottom of the shifts.
Hover over the gaps shift you want to assign and select assign. This will open up a modal and show you who has requested the shift.
Employee responses to gap shifts will be listed in chronological order based on when they requested the shift. This helps managers to ensure fairness.
Select the employee or employees if your gap had a quantity of more than one then click assign. The shift will be given to the employee in draft format. To finalise the allocation, click the approve button in the top right corner.