Although it may feel like we leapfrogged straight from March into October, looking back at the incredible journey of adaptability and resilience that so many of our customers have undertaken this year, reminds us otherwise.
As we continue to navigate this new, unfamiliar territory together, one thing that will never change is our commitment to delivering the updates and improvements that will help businesses to thrive and grow, no matter what 2020 and beyond have in store for us.
From better time off management to improved scheduling for remote workers, read on to see how Deputy continues to seek to help you and your teams.
đź—“ Shift your schedule view to monthly
Just like no two businesses are the same, we know that the way that you prefer to schedule can also vary greatly.
While it makes perfect sense for some businesses to build schedules one week or even one day at a time, for others, particularly in the healthcare space, a weekly schedule isn’t as practical.
Enter Deputy’s new monthly schedule view.
For businesses that need to plan shifts well into the future, the monthly view provides a better, big picture overview that can quickly surface any gaps in coverage. In addition, the monthly view can highlight any less than ideal working patterns for employees (for example, an employee working the same night shift every weekend).
Managers aren’t the only ones who benefit. Staff also benefit from receiving more predictable schedules, allowing them to better plan their life around work.
And if you’re still a fan of the printed schedule, the good news is you can export the monthly view or print it out to stick on the wall just as you would with the weekly schedule.
🏖 Get a better view of Time Off
We appreciate your ongoing feedback of how we can make your working life easier. So, within the new monthly view for schedules, we’ve added a new collapsable area called “Time Off.”
This Time Off area highlights any upcoming unavailability, leave requests, and approved leave within the schedule view, so you can quickly see who won’t be available for that day’s schedule.
📝 Take note: We’ve improved the way you capture notes
A successful business empowers its employees with all the information and context they need to do their best work possible.
After hearing from our customers, we’ve now made a few improvements to make sure that nothing gets left out or overlooked when it comes to capturing notes, read on to see the updates.
Location notes
For many businesses, Locations in Deputy are job sites that are separate to the primary workplace. For this reason, location notes are a useful way to keep an employee across the details of anything they need to know about the job they are to perform at that location. For example, a business providing in-home care might use location notes to provide details about a particular patient’s requirements or link to their patient care plan.
Rather than only being able to add a limited amount of text, managers can now attach files (including PDFs, docs, and images) as well as add up to 5000 characters in the location notes field. In addition, staff will also now be able to view these notes and attachments while on their shift.
Shift notes
Just like location notes, adding notes to a specific shift on the schedule can help provide employees with the details they need to perform their best work on that particular shift.
Previously, managers could add 255 characters to a shift note —now they can add 1000 characters. We wanted to give you a little more room so you can ensure your team has all the relevant information they need to carry out their work successfully.
Timesheet comments:
Lastly, employees need the space to provide additional detail about anything that happened on their shift. In Deputy, this can be done as employees are submitting their timesheet as they clock off. That gives managers a dated record of everything that happened on shift as part of the timesheet.
To ensure employees have enough space to add a detailed account of anything they need to about that shift*, we’ve also increased the character limit of timesheet comments up to 1000 characters.
*Pro-tip: You can also capture additional details about a shift such as distance traveled, if it was accident-free, or confirming meal breaks were taken using our custom Shift Question feature.
🌙 Get all the details from the night before
This is a small, but pretty neat update, especially handy for businesses that schedule employees across 24 hour schedules or over the night period.
Previously in Deputy, if an employee was scheduled on a shift that started on one day and ended on another, the tail end of the shift would appear without any detail as the manager switched to the second day.
To make sure that nothing gets missed (and there’s no more flicking backward and forward between days), an overnight shift will now automatically include all the shift details on both days of the shift.
đźš— Power up your remote workforce
Scheduling remote or site-based employees is not a new phenomenon, but it has definitely become a more common practice in light of the pandemic.
To improve the scheduling experience for field-based workers, we’ve added the ability to add an address to an area of work inside Deputy.
By adding an address to an area, employees have a clear idea of where they need to be for each shift as well as a drop pin on how to get there.
As employees are due to start work — whether that be at a patient’s house, a construction site, or even in their own home — Deputy can use a geo-location capture to confirm that the employee is in the correct place for that shift.
