How to master rota planning

Creating staff rotas and scheduling shifts can be laborious. Poorly designed rotas can have a negative impact on business and publishing rotas can mean a concoction of spreadsheets, messenger apps and even pieces of paper.

Random rota fact: some managers take photos of a biro-scribbled wall calendar, and send it to their people via Whatsapp.

How do we know this? Because you told us.

Shifts and Rotas

We asked managers all about the problems they were having when it came to sorting the staff shifts and planning rotas. But what are the problems managers face and how does BrightHR solve them?

1. Create staff rotas and shifts quickly and accurately. Shift scheduling in our software is a doddle to set-up thanks to our user-friendly interface. To save time you can create single or multiple rolling shift patterns, add or remove people with a click, and you can build and review rotas in draft before publishing to your staff.

2. Publish the schedules online, from the same place you planned and built them.
Sounds simple but it’s surprising how many people have to take a spreadsheet or piece of paper and distribute it manually, whether attaching a spreadsheet to an email or pinning a paper version to a noticeboard. With BrightHR, all the information is scheduled, published and shared securely in one place.

3. Share rotas with employees with a simple click, so that everyone has access. Once you’re happy with the shifts you’ve scheduled on the rota, simply hit send and it’ll fire a real-time notification to the staff involved. And that’s it: everyone has instant 24/7 access, via the website or our mobile app (Our app is lovely; we recommend all BrightHR users download it.)

4. Make changes to live shift schedules whilst on the move. Nothing at work is static; neither people nor plans. And we know how important it is to swap, change and fine-tune shifts and rotas once they’re live. This is simple with BrightHR, and can be done as many times as you need. Our product is designed to work just as smoothly on your mobile phone, so changes can be made from anywhere with an internet connection.

5. Have staff notified of new or updated shifts via their smartphone. It’s all well and good making changes to the staff rota, but if staff haven’t received an update or confirmation things really start to break down. So with any change you make, an instant notification is automatically sent to all associated users via the BrightHR mobile app. This will pop up on their smartphone just like any social media alert. (And we all know how quickly people respond to those.)

6. Have a ‘single version of the truth’, where changes are updated automatically across all devices. The real crux of it, and critical for any business: version control. Knowing that what you’re looking at is what everyone else is looking at and that it’s correct. With BrightHR, no matter which device you’re using, all changes and updates are automatically synced in real-time.

Like all the features in BrightHR, we’ve built Shifts & rotas based on what business owners and managers have told us, the challenges you have on a daily basis, and ultimately the goals you have for your company.

Want to see how our Shifts & Rotas feature can help your business? Request your free demo of BrightHR today