Creating shifts and sending offers using bulk shifts

Shift offers is an alternative way to add shifts and build your roster; it can be very useful when you need to quickly fill or replace shifts. 

The image below demonstrates the shift offer process at a high level. 

  Please note: This article explains how to use shift offers created with the bulk shifts feature and clarifies the differences between the various shift offering methods your platform provides. 

What is a shift offer?

The key difference when offering shifts is that employees must accept or decline them, rather than being assigned a shift and informed of when and where they are expected to work.

By default, your shift offers expire within 8 hours; however, this period can be adjusted according to your business's preference. 

  For information on updating the number of hours before a shift offer expires, please see our guide here. 

Different methods for offering shifts

When managing shift offers on your platform, it's important to first assess your needs for providing these shifts and decide how many you need to create. Knowing the purpose behind these shifts will guide you in choosing the most suitable method for your business. 

Some reasons to consider when selecting your shift offer approach include:

• Maintaining consistent staff levels
• Providing your team with more flexibility, or
• Addressing last-minute scheduling

To assist with decision-making, it can be helpful to review the list below of various shift needs and whether the shift offer method is appropriate across different shift offering options. 

  For more information on the specific methods for offering and open shifts from the roster, please check out our Creating offers and open shifts from the roster help guide here. 

Functionality when creating shifts from bulk shifts

When determining the most effective method for managing and offering shifts, it's important to take into account specific functionalities that may be required for your rostering needs. 

This could include features such as:

• Shift costing - Which helps to track the financial implications of staffing choices.
• Allowances - Add specific allowances, such as accommodation, nauseous, or travel. 
• Roster notes - Allows you to include important information or special instructions for each shift.

To aid your decision-making, reviewing the list below of the various features across different rostering options can be helpful. This comparison will help you identify the tools that best suit your operational needs.

What happens once a shift has been offered?

For employees, the process is as follows:

1. After a shift has been offered, the respective employees will receive a notification through email or SMS, depending on your communication settings.
2. The employee must then accept or decline the shift offer using the Employee App before it expires.
3. Accepted employee shifts will display in the 'Upcoming Shifts' section of their Employee App. These shifts will no longer be able to be accepted by other employees.

Any offers that expire, the shift(s) will automatically be declined.

  To understand how employees accept or decline offered shifts, please refer to our Employee article on Accept or decline a shift offer.
 

For Managers, once shifts have been offered, they will be displayed on the relevant roster.

To make it easier to differentiate between offered shifts, we use different colours to represent their unique statuses.

When an employee accepts an offered shift, it appears on the roster as accepted and is handled like any other published shift.

  For a complete guide on shift statuses, please refer to our article Rostered Shifts - Status, Warnings & Errors.

Creating Bulk Shifts is an excellent tool for rostering a large number of shifts, especially for shift work. This feature allows you to create identical shifts for multiple days on the same roster.

Additionally, you can offer shifts. Using Bulk Shifts for shift offers lets you simultaneously offer shifts to multiple employees, filling your roster quickly. 

The Bulk Shifts feature is the general go-to method when offering shifts and is particularly beneficial in the following situations:

• Filling shifts when employees call in sick
• Rostering for a large event or shift work
• Building out rosters months in advance
• The ability to create rosters with assigned shifts (for your A-grade team) while using Shift Offers to offer remaining shifts (for your casual pool) in one place

  Hot tip: If you want to create multiple shifts at once or offer shift(s) to many employees at once to quickly see who accepts, this is your best method.
 

To create shifts and offers in Bulk Shifts:

1. Navigate to Work > Rosters; in the top right-hand corner, select Bulk actions > Shifts. 
2. From the dropdown menus, complete the following options:
   • Operation
   • Roster
   • Shift Start Date and End Dates - You can create shifts up to 3 months in advance. 
   • Days of the week - Choose the days when shifts are needed. All specified days will show on the right-hand calendar.

3. In Unpaid break, add the break duration and start time (Optional).

   

4. Select Position to open and edit the following fields:
   • Position
   • Number of positions - This is the number of shifts required per day for this position. 
   • Tag requirements (Optional) - This can be used to filter employees with specific tags for these shifts.  
   • Roster/shift requirements (Optional) - This will filter employees based on specific compliance requirements (RSA, RCG, etc.) for these shifts. 

   • Comments (Optional) - Use this to add a comment to the shifts. Use the toggle to make the comment visible to employees.

     

5. Select Find Employees to select employees, or toggle on the Find Employees Later to leave shifts unfilled on your roster. 
   • In the Find Employees modal, you can:
     • Assign specific employees to the shifts - This will roster one shift per day to the employee(s) for each day selected
     • Offer all shifts to specific employees - You can assign and offer shifts to employees at the same time. 
     • Offer all shifts to all employees by selecting Offer to All.
       
         Please note: If you choose to find employees later, you will only be able to manage those shifts on the Unfilled Shifts page and will not be able to edit or remove them from the roster. 
6. Select Save.
   • You can add additional positions by selecting Add Position (Optional).
     • Repeat Step 5 for all additional positions required. 

7. To publish/offer shifts, select Create Shifts.

   

 Hot tip: Once an employee accepts an offer, all other employees will receive a follow-up communication (email or SMS) informing them that the offered shift is no longer available.
 

Offering shifts from Unfilled Shifts offers a quick and straightforward method to efficiently manage and follow up on unassigned shifts within your platform. 

Unassigned shifts can appear in Unfilled Shifts when:

• Shifts have been declined, and a new shift has been automatically generated
• Shifts have been cancelled, and a new shift has been automatically generated
• Find Employees Later' was selected when creating Bulk Shifts
• Single shifts of the 'Assign shift' type on the roster that have no employee allocated.

To fill a shift from Unfilled shifts:

1. Navigate to Work > Rosters; in the top right-hand corner, select Unfilled shifts.
2. Locate your Unfilled Bulk Shifts / Unfilled Shifts summary.
3. Select Find employees for the required shift, then Add. 
   • For Unfilled Bulk Shifts, select Find Employees to offer all shifts.
   • Or select Individual Unfilled Shifts to offer a singular shift. 
4. Select Offer/Assign for all required employees, or Offer All.
5. Select Send.

If you'd like to make the most of offer shifts on your platform, consider a few important platform-wide settings that can affect how you offer shifts. Understanding these settings can help you make the best decision for your business needs.

There are a few key settings to consider when offering shifts:  

• Create new, unassigned shifts from declined and expired individual shift offers - This setting will automatically duplicate unassigned shifts on your roster for any offers that have expired, declined or cancelled. 
• Offer Expire (hours) - This setting determines how many hours before a shift offer expires. 

  For information on updating the number of hours before a shift offer expires, please see our guide here. 
 

To enable the creation of new shifts for declined offers:

1. Navigate to the main menu > Platform Settings > System Settings.
2. Locate the setting, Create declined and expired individual shift offers as new unassigned shifts.
3. To update the required setting, turn the toggle to On.
   
   
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and Save.

In this example, Clair has declined the Mon-Wed shifts; the platform has created three new unassigned shifts. As a result, her manager can easily identify which shifts need to be filled.

This is due to the "Create declined and expired individual shift offers as new unassigned shifts" setting being enabled.

Your platform facilitates platform-wide communication tailored to the specific shifts you offer. You can send these messages to your employees or managers. By default, communications are sent via email. However, if your platform has SMS functionality enabled, you can opt to receive these messages via SMS instead.

  To learn how to edit your platform communication templates or for a list of communications for all methods of sending shift offers, you can read more here. 

When a shift is offered, your platform automatically sends email notifications to your employees to inform them about the available shifts. You can also specify which admins should be notified when offers are accepted or declined. Additionally, managers can receive notifications about the offers that have been sent.

To specify who receives the notifications via offering shifts from bulk shifts:

1. Refer to the section "Create shifts and send offers using Bulk Shifts" for a full guide to creating bulk shifts.
2. Once you have added the relevant Operation and Roster, select the pencil icons to 
   • Enable comms when shift is approved - A notification will be sent when an employee accepts a shift offer.
   • Enable comms when shift is declined - A notification will be sent when an employee declines a shift offer.
     
     Within each of the above toggles, select from the following people to notify:
     • Operation Manager - The manager of the operation. This can be seen from the Operation overview.
     • Employee Manager - The manager on the employee profile. This can be seen in the Employee profile overview.
     • Specific People - Select people individually from all available admin and operation users.
3. Enter the remaining shift details and offer them to the relevant employees.

The Bulk Shift Offers report is an incredibly valuable tool, as it lets you easily track the status of all shift offers sent from Bulk shifts, ensuring you are always up to date on which offers have been accepted, declined, expired, or are still pending.

  Please note: This report only provides information on shift offers created through the Bulk actions > Shifts menu within the roster page. To keep track of all open and offered shifts generated from your roster, refer to our Open and Offered Shifts report guide here. 

The Bulk Shift Offers report allows you to quickly identify any issues or trends that may require your attention, such as the ability to:

• See the status of shift offers for a specific Operation, Roster, Office Code, or employees
• See how quickly employees are responding to shift offers
• Identify any employee trends, such as which employees always accept a shift, which employees are more selective, and which employees respond quickly

  Permission Reminder: This report respects your user permissions. This means that the employees displayed in the report will be the ones you can see, as per your user search restrictions/office codes.

For example, a manager may only see the employees they manage in this report.
 

To run the Bulk Shift Offers report:

1. Navigate to Reports > Workforce reports and select the Bulk Shift Offers report.
2. Select the duration (i.e. the period for which you'd like to see the shift offer). You can further filter the information if needed by using the following filters:
   • Employees
   • Operation
   • Office Code
   • Roster
   • Shift Offer Status - Pending, Accepted, Declined and Expired.

3. Submit the report. The report will then show columns for:

   • Employee - The employee to whom the shift was offered.
   • Office Code - The office code linked to the employee's profile.
   • Operation - The operation linked to the roster that was selected when the bulk shift was created.
   • Roster - The roster that was selected when the bulk shift was created.
   • Offer Status - Whether the shift is Pending, Accepted, Declined or Expired.
   • Shift Date - The date that the shift is for.
   • Shift time - The time of the offered shift.
   • Offer time - When the shift was offered.
   • Response time - How quickly the employee responded to the shift offer.

     Hot tip: Select the column names to see your data listed in ascending or descending order based on that column. 

4. You can also print or export as a CSV or PDF.

What is the difference between bulk shifts and open/offer shifts?

The main difference between bulk shifts and open/offer shifts is as follows:

• Bulk Shifts: This method allows you to send offers (only offers, not open shifts) to multiple employees for multiple shifts simultaneously.
• Roster Shifts: This method enables you to send either offers or open shifts for a specific shift to multiple employees directly from the roster. 

What shift offers option is better for me?

Both options help you assign shifts efficiently, but the best choice depends on how many shifts you need to create and how much control you want in the selection process.

For help on determining the best shift offer method, check out the different shift offer methods and functionality tables within the 'Before you start' section. 

What happens once an offered shift has been accepted? Do my other employees know?

Once an employee has accepted any shift offers, the shifts are published to the roster and will appear the same as other published shifts. 

For all other employees who were sent an offer, as this shift has been filled, they will receive a notification stating "Your recent shift offer is no longer available as all positions have been filled. Regards, Your Company". 

If I send a bulk offer for multiple shifts, does an employee need to accept all of them? What if they can only do a few of the offered shifts?

When shifts are offered through Bulk Shifts, employees can select the specific shifts they wish to work or accept all of them at once.

If an employee accidentally declines an offer, can it be accepted later?

After employee declines a shift offer, no further action is required from the employee.

For platforms with the setting "Create declined and expired individual shift offers as new unassigned shifts" turned on, the declined shift will automatically be duplicated on the roster.

This means the duplicate shift can then be published, or offered to the employee as a new offer to be accepted. 

If an employee accidentally accepts an offer, can it then be declined?

Once an employee has accepts any shift offers, the shifts are published to the roster and are treated the same as any other published shifts.

If your platform uses the Shift Cancellation feature, employees cancel their shift provided it is within the set notice period. 

However, if you do not use this feature or the employee hasn't given enough notice they can contact their manager. The manager can then cancel the shift (or reassign it to another employee) from the roster and republish to send the cancellation.

What are some of the reasons my staff can no longer accept shift offers?

Shift offers will no longer be available to your employees when:

•  The shift offer is in the past
• The shift offer has been filled by another employee
• The offer has expired

By default, employees have 8 hours to accept or decline shift offers, after which the offer will automatically decline.

  This setting can be adjusted to your preference; for more information, refer to our guide here. 

I have sent a shift offer that I need to recall. Is this possible? 

Yes, shift offers can be cancelled. Once a shift has been offered, it creates a pending shift offer on the relevant roster.

To recall an offer, simply delete the corresponding pending offers from the roster. You'll then need to republish these changes on the roster to send the cancellation.

What is the easiest way for my employees to be informed of the offered shifts?

After a shift has been offered, the respective employees will receive a notification through email or SMS, depending on the communication settings for your platform.

However, for the most effective method to communicate shift-based changes is to use Push Notitificaitons. 

Can we add multiple breaks, i.e. paid and unpaid breaks, to shift offers using bulk shifts?      

When sending offers for bulk shifts, you can only include one unpaid break with this method. If you wish to add multiple breaks to an offer, it's recommended to use offers and open shifts from the roster instead.