Regular Repeating Shifts

 

 

In this video, we’re going to look at regular repeat shifts. The key points that will be discussed include;

• How to Create a Regular Repeating Shift
• Formatting your Schedule Options
• How to view and edit this Shifts in Week View

These types of shifts are a really good idea if you have staff members on a fixed pattern or fixed schedule that repeats. For example, this could be a weekly pattern that repeats, or it could be a Week 1 pattern going into Week 2, etc. 

 

Step 1

Creating a Regular Repeating Shift

 

Finding Staff Member Profile

So first, with regular repeating shifts, you want actually to go into a staff member's profile. You can do this by going into the Staff Directory to find a staff member. For this example, I’m going to click through and go to Aaron’s profile.

If I go into shift management under the Action Bar, you can go through it, and you can see regular repeating shifts. Then click on that.

 

 

Adding Repeating Shifts

First, you will need to go in and add some regular shifts. You can see here it’s showing me week one. And I can just pick his Week one pattern here. So I can say on Week one on Monday Aaron works from 12 until 1. I’m going to pick the venue here, ‘Venue Uno’ and pick the skill as well. If you want to add in a task you can add in a task in here as well.

 

 

For week one, I’m also going to put in another shift. Aaron also works Tuesday from 11 to 1. So again, you can change the location or put in the same venue or skill. For Aaron, we’re going to add another shift as well.

 

Putting in Several Weeks

Now, you can keep it the same or do it Monday through Friday. However, if you just go down to here and see the number of weeks, I’m actually going to change mine to a two-week schedule.

 

 

What this means is that  if I put in a two week schedule I can go through and say that on week 1 on a Monday on Tuesday these are Aarons timings, however on week two they might work a completely different day, so Wednesday for example.

 

Then after the second week it is going to revert back to the week one schedule when it's finished. Then, just put the venue in here and put that through as well.

 

So, basically, if I go through and add these in, this is going to create me a schedule. It's going to go through week one, week two, and then revert back.

 

Step 2

Formatting Your Regular Repeating Shifts

Once you have set up the shifts you want for your set number of weeks there are some further formatting options to consider.

 

Starting Date 

You can also start regular shifts from a certain date, this date can also be a different date from today.

 

Limiting the Creation of Shifts

You can also limit the creation of shifts. You can choose ‘do not limit’, keep creating shifts automatically.

 

Alternatively, you could choose to stop shifts from repeating at a certain point in the future. 

Automatically, shifts will keep going for a couple of years into the future. However, if I say, for example, in October, you wanted to stop automatic shifts and instead want to review them, you could choose to limit automatic shifts to the date of your choice.

 

Number of Weeks

Additionally, you can start formatting more of your options here. You can choose the number of weeks you want to schedule at a time. As you can see for this example I have put in 2 weeks here. 

So I have week 1 and week 2, however, if I have regular patterns of shifts, I could do all the shift patterns up to 20 weeks, and then it would revert back to week 1. Useful for more complex scheduling needs.

 

So you might have people who are on rolling shifts, you might use four-week patterns, and if you put that in here, you just do it as four weeks, and if you add in a regular shift here, you can then see that when you are putting in your shifts you can go all the way up to week four. You can leave this as is for now, and you can then add all the shifts you would need for each week. 

 

Week 1 Start Date

You can also see here there's a week 1 start date so you can decide here what the start date will be to implement the repeating shifts. 

 

Exception Dates

You can also put an exception date if you have these set within your company. They will feature in these drop-downs here, i.e. if there are some dates that would not be included.

 

National & Organisational Holidays

Then you decide whether you also want to create the shifts on national holidays or you can ignore them. This is the same with organisation holidays. 

 

Shift Visibility

When you create the shift, you can decide how you want them to appear. You can choose to hide them, and then you will publish them when they are ready to go out to staff members. If you have chosen to hide them, you will have to manually unhide them, so that's a decision you can make.

You can also lock them. Locked means ‘locked into place,’ and staff members can't swap shifts. Then, you can just save your preferences.

 

Step 3

Checking Viability

With advanced shift scheduling, it is important that the shifts you plan to schedule make sense and are viable compared to what has already been scheduled. The system will check viability for you, which we will go through now. The system will now check that these shift patterns are viable.

 

You can see that in this example, my member of staff is already working too close to this other shift, which prevents the system from creating the desired shift pattern. As you can see, the system will flag up any difficulties it can't do. 

 

Step 4

Viewing & Editing Regular Repeating Shifts in Week View

 

Viewing Shifts

Once these issues have been resolved manually and the shifts have been created, they will go into your 'Manage Shift Week', where you will be able to see them. 

 

 

Then you just need to specify the venue to look at, then you can see different shift patterns for Aaron here will come up for me. The system has put in the week one shifts as you can see. Then when you go to view the next week, you can see there are the shifts we put into week two. 

 

So you can see the different patterns that we have just put in featuring in the rota. The system will also put these shifts into order for you, and it will keep running all shifts until you decide to stop them. 

 

Amending Shift Entries

If you do need to amend shift you can use the manage shift week page and click on one  of the entries that you've created. So for example if I decide that I want to change the entry I can do that on this page as well. 

As you can see in the diagram below, you have a lot of options you can edit.

 

If you do have multiple changes you regularly make with a rota, we wouldn't recommend using this kind of shift pattern because it very much works with set shift patterns, and that's the best way to do it.

As a final note, if you do decide to use the shift pattern please speak to your system manager because there will be a contract change if you are relying on holiday to be calculated in this way.