Staff Skills/Roles

Staff Skills

Skills are the cornerstone of all shift and timesheet management within StaffSavvy. Note: You can call these items skills or roles; contact our support team to change this.

Understanding Skills

A skill is a group of interchangeable staff for a particular job or task. For example, you might have Cocktail Maker as a skill.

Everyone who is assigned to that skill is considered equal and interchangeable. If they are not, they need to be split into smaller skills, for example, Senior Bar Staff and Junior Bar Staff. You can have any number of skills; the key is that everyone assigned to that skill/role is interchangeable with everyone else.

Skills are used to easily categorise people into shifts (e.g., fill this shift with anyone with the skill of Senior Bar Staff) and swap shifts (e.g., only staff assigned to the same skill will be able to take the shift).

You can categorise skills as well, so you can quickly filter the long list down to the relevant ones to review. Click the Set Category button to add a category as needed.

Changes to skills

When skills are changed, staff members will receive an automatic notification. This ensures that each staff member receives all information that pertains to them and might affect any upcoming shifts.

Venue specific

Skills can also be assigned to specific venues under venue settings (System > Departments & Venues > Manage Venues). This is helpful if you have more specific skills. When assigning skills to staff, you can only assign staff to a skill if that skill has been assigned to a venue they and the assignee work at. So the system should show only those skills the assignee is interested in.

Skill Settings

We will now go through the key configuration options you have when creating or editing a Skill

General Settings

When creating a skill, you can set the basic details and who can view it. You can set a department for the skill, create a title and set if the Skill will be the default skill for new staff.

Privacy

You can also set whether you want to keep the skill completely hidden from any searches or profile pages. This option is designed to be used only when you have a skill that no one else should know about.

Display Leadership Team for a shift

Under shift settings you can also decide whether a role should be considered a Leadership role. 

This is set under under the General Settings tab when editing a Skill, once you scroll down to the Visibility to others section and under Colleagues. 

The first two options can be used for general staff skills and require you to set whether you want other staff to be able to view this skill if they are from the same Venue or share the same Primary Venue Group. 

The last two options allow you to set up a skill as a leadership position, and again you can choose whether this will be shown only to staff working at the same venue, or to staff who share a primary venue group. The second option allows staff assigned to different venues (but who share a primary venue group) to still be shown the leadership team for the whole of the Primary Venue Group.

Style

You can also stylise your skill, select a colour (each skill will then show up as a separate colour when viewing Schedule View), and choose an appropriate and unique icon from our 70 options, making your skills easy to identify. 

Holiday

The final options under your general settings allow to limit Holiday for staff with the same Skills.

If enabled the Holiday Limit option will automatically reject holiday requests from staff with this Skill if the total number of people either, across all venues or at their home venue drops below a certain number (which you can set up here).

Pay for skills

There are four options for paying staff for a shift: pay per hour, pay per item (e.g. per shift), pay on-call (fixed pay per instance plus an additional paid time if needed) and hourly with a fixed value (allows the hours to be reported but only a fixed pay item is paid). Simply choose the option that matches the general payment process for that skill.

Note: Salaried staff should use a pay-per-hour rate set to 0. This allows the hours to be calculated and recorded without additional financial costs associated with the time entry.

Pay-per-hour payments mean the staff member will be paid an hourly rate for the exact time worked after breaks and adjustments.

Pay-per-item means that regardless of the scheduled shift length, the staff member will be paid one pay item for that “shift”. It’s important only to use this when absolutely necessary. Most combinations of payments can be archived with pay per time (including minimum payments, automatic double time, etc).

On-call shifts use a combination of both: there is a fixed pay item per shift, which is always paid, plus the option to add additional hours at an hourly rate. Once the additional hours have been added, they can be added when editing the time entry, and additional travel or active time can be paid on top of the fixed amount.

Hourly with fixed value is for special circumstances where staff need to be paid a fixed value for a shift, but you also need to report the actual number of hours worked as part of the shift.

Pay element rates and skills

Each skill has a default pay element. This is the hourly rate the staff member will be paid when working a shift in this skill. This is edited under a staff member's profile. 

If the staff member should be paid a different pay rate, then you can override the default pay element when managing their skills. In the example below, Adam is paid a special rate whenever he works a cloakroom shift.

You can also configure automatic rate changes based on factors, including time worked for a company or age. You can see more in pay elements.

Adding display for hourly rates on profile pages.

You can now display hourly rates on a staff member’s profile under the training and skills tab (if enabled). You must have the View Pay Permission enabled to view this. This should already be enabled, but to ensure this has been enabled, go to Manage Access Permissions and find it under Clock in, Time Sheets, Pay & Expenses. This permission will be expanded to cover the protection of all pay displayed within the system; currently, it just covers the new features.

Clocking in remotely

There options allows staff to clock in from any location for these shifts, but there must be a shift scheduled to clock in for. You can also decide here if clock ins can be added retrospectively for this skill.

You can also set whether to include a remote location. This will request the current location from their device but is accurate only when using GPS.

Cost Code Management

Allow staff to choose their own code to use when clocking in or have a manager set it. There is also the option to allow codes to be changed mid-shift.

Skill requirements

There is the option to stipulate requirements to work on a skill/role. The requirements mean staff must complete all requirements to be scheduled for shifts with that skill/role. This can be altered via Staff > Staff Settings > Staff Skills > Edit > Requirements.

Be warned that changes to the requirements are applied instantly. This might prevent some staff from working until the requirements are met, even if they are already on the rota, so remember this when adding new requirements to established skills. It is advisable to complete the requirements before adding them to the skill/role.

You can set the mode to Requested, not required. This will warn staff to complete the items listed, but still allow them to access shifts.

Requirement Options

There are several different types of Skill requirement which we will now explain.

Training Program Requirements

With this requirement, staff must have completed the required training program (and all the parts it contains).

The expiration settings on the training program will ensure that staff members keep their training requirements active to gain access to the skill. Additionally, you can add a Certificate requirement here if a formal certification is required for that skill.

Document Requirements

Document requirements mean staff must have supplied documents uploaded to the site to be active in this skill.

You can create any number of document types and place requirements on the documents, such as requiring management verification.

You can also stipulate an expiry date for each document type. Therefore, managers must confirm the expiry date when the document is uploaded.

The site will automatically ask for a replacement document once the document's expiry date approaches.

Library Item Requirements

Library Item requirements require staff members with this skill to either review, view, or add a digital signature to an item in the resource library.

You can apply a grace period by which the staff member should complete reviewing the item to allow time to review/sign new versions of the library item. 

Exam Requirements

This allows you to specify exams that staff assigned to the skill must complete to work in the skill.

You can also specify an expiration period for which staff must retake the exam. This allows you to ensure staff repeatedly take this exam at regular intervals.

Integrations

If you have set this up in Global Settings, you can also match Skills with those set up within your integrated platforms. Simply select from the drop down.

If you have not enabled integrations go to System > Configuration > Global Settings > Integrations.  

Staff Point of View

Staff will be informed via email if the requirements change in their skills/roles. A warning is also displayed on their dashboard and under their My Shifts pages if the staff member’s requirements are missing or are due to expire.

Requirements Report

This report is available for each skill and displays all staff assigned to that skill. Next to each staff member is a current status for their access to that skill:

• Active (with any expiry dates): They can be assigned shifts for this skill. If there is an expiration date shown, then this is the limit until which they can receive shifts until new documents, training, or exams are uploaded or completed, which extends the expiration date.
• Inactive: Requirements not met. They cannot currently be assigned shifts for this skill as one or more of the required items have not been completed or have expired.

Across the rest of the page, all of the requirements and the status for each staff member are displayed. This allows you to see at a glance who has completed which items and which items expire on each date.

The options for each of the requirements per staff member are:

• Complete - The item has been completed and has no expiry date.
• Complete: expires X - The item has been completed and expires on the given date.
• Not provided or not yet verified -The item is outstanding; they might have provided the document, but it’s not yet been checked, or simply they haven’t completed the requirement at all.
• Not required, not complete - The requirement has not been completed, but it’s marked as “Requested, not required”, so it does not block access to working the shifts.