Post Open Shifts by Seniority

For some time now, Agendrix has enabled managers to post open shifts for which employees could apply on a voluntary basis. However, there was no easy way to take the employees’ seniority into account when publishing such open shifts. This is now a thing of the past!

This improvement to the open shift feature will enable you to submit shifts to employees who have the most seniority first. This way, you won’t have to contact each individual employee and wait for their response; everything can be automated in advance, according to your preferences.

Thus, upon publishing an open shift by seniority, the employee with the most seniority is then given a certain amount of time to accept or decline the shift. If they decline or fail to respond within the allotted time, the shift is simply sent to the next most senior employee, and so on, until it is filled. If no one ends up accepting the shift, a notification is sent directly to their manager so that they can handle the situation manually.

A Feature That Makes Complying With Collective Agreements Easier

No matter how easy Agendrix makes things, we found that certain organizations struggled when it came to seniority-based management. The reason is simple: many collective agreements require employee seniority to be taken into account when assigning work shifts, including open shifts (for which everyone can apply).

What’s more, many collective agreements also require managers to provide a reasonable response time before offering a given work shift to the next employee. This constraint would greatly extend the time needed to reach the end of the process.

So, it is our hope that this new feature will help more managers to streamline how they assign open shifts—and cut down on oft-repeated and unnecessary communication.

Steps for Publishing Open Shifts by Seniority

As a quick reminder, the open shift by seniority feature is available to organizations subscribed to the Plus plan.

Before you can create open shifts by seniority, you must first activate the feature:

• After signing in to your Agendrix account, click the Settings tab in the main navigation menu, click on Scheduling, then on Seniority in the submenu.
• Activate the Offer open shifts by seniority setting, and specify a time in the Response time limit field as required.
• Press Save.

To publish open shifts by seniority:

• Click the Schedule tab in the main navigation menu.
• In the day or week view, click on any cell in the Open shifts row at the top of the scheduler.
• Enter the necessary information (start and end times, position, etc.), then click on Manage audience.
• In the pane, the By seniority option should be enabled by default; if not, activate it. As needed, you can also include or exclude employees from the audience here.
• Close the pane, save your changes as needed, click on Create, then publish the schedule.

Upon publishing the open shift, the employees included in your audience will be notified individually in order of seniority. If the first employee declines the offer, the next employee on the list will be notified, and so on.

Enjoy your discovery!