Deputy makes scheduling a breeze for Tradies Clubs

Employing more than 41,400 individuals across the state and home to more than 5.7 million members, registered clubs are at the heart of every community in New South Wales. Clubs foster a strong sense of community by actively partnering with local charities and community-based initiatives as well as local sporting teams, especially junior sport.

The Sutherland District Trade Union Club (Tradies Gymea) began as a place where trade union members could discuss industrial, political and social issues. In 1960, Tradies became a registered club and evolved into a neighborhood center where the community could gather, relax and enjoy themselves.

Since this time, the club has grown and now operates three venues at Caringbah, Helensburgh as well as Gymea. Across the three clubs, Tradies employs 200 individuals in a wide number of hospitality roles and is widely recognized for achieving excellence in community service, customer service, and people management. In fact, for many other registered clubs in NSW Tradies Gymea is the benchmark in customer service excellence and send their staff to the club for training and development.

Like any people-intensive business, work scheduling effectively is an important part of running the business efficiently. To provide their optimal level of customer service, scheduling the right number of staff with the right experience at the right time is critical.

However, according to Joumana Jacob, Chief Operating Officer at Tradies, it was becoming increasingly frustrating and time-consuming for her managers to create weekly work schedules. In addition, they didn’t have hard data to use to precisely calculate how many staff they needed to work at any given time.

“Although we were using a purpose-built system, there was no historical data that we could draw upon to help us run the business and plan better around busy or quiet times, so we had to rely on guesswork. What’s more, we couldn’t easily keep track of who was available – and able – to take particular shifts.

“But creating and publishing the weekly schedule was just half the job. Once we’d published the work schedule, we had to email it to staff and pin a hard copy up on the notice board to get feedback and changes before republishing it.

“Plus, in terms of managing time and attendance, we used another complicated process. To start and end their shifts, our employees were required to finger scan when they clocked in and out. We then had to reconcile this data with their timesheets before it could be processed by payroll.

“In all, the level of admin around managing our work scheduling and time and attendance tasks was almost a full-time job,” says Jacob. “In fact, it was taking four full days each week.”

“As we were already benefitting from moving our day-to-day HR and WHS admin to the cloud with enableHR, I asked our contact there if they knew a better way to handle time and attendance. Without hesitation, they recommended Deputy.”

Deputy was able to solve the work scheduling challenges at Tradies and provide a huge improvement by optimizing time and attendance management.

Jacob comments, “From day one, with Deputy, creating work schedules is really simple. Having all your data in one centralized location means you can see who’s available and able to take shifts and make sure you don’t inadvertently schedule someone who’s not available.

“In terms of communicating the work schedules with our staff, there’s absolutely no need to resort to manual emails or other forms of communication outside the platform.

“Plus, everything is mobile friendly which is a must if you’re like us and employ a large number of young people. You can view the schedules, make changes and communicate with your staff all from the one platform, wherever you are, 24/7. Your staff can accept or reject shifts and view their weekly schedules via the app on their mobile devices. So they’re never uninformed.”

For Tradies, Deputy has dramatically cut out paperwork and the endless emails, text messages and phone calls which used to be required to firm up schedules or chase up unfilled shifts. Jacob adds, “Whenever someone calls in sick and you need to replace them in a hurry, you can simply find a replacement through Deputy by reaching out to relevant staff members via the platform. Your staff receives text alerts on their mobile devices that shifts are available. If they want to take them, they simply accept the shifts from the app.

“Interestingly, having such a great communication tool like Deputy has really helped build our team spirit. Everyone’s in the loop. No-one has the frustration of turning up for work to find they’re not scheduled on, or the time of their shift has changed. And now payroll is a breeze.

“Staff simply clock in and out using the app, which populates the timesheets which their managers can approve in a click. We have Deputy integrated with Wage Easy our payroll tool, which works seamlessly. Once a timesheet is approved in Deputy, it’s ready for payroll to pay staff. No double checking or manual reconciliation is required. This has saved us so much time in each pay cycle.

Favourite feature

I love using Deputy to see who is scheduled on in different parts of the business at any particular time, who’s taking a break, and who’s about to start work. When you need to make sure a particular job gets done at a particular time, such as an early set up of the Southern Terrace for a wedding reception, our duty managers simply assign a task to an individual or team, who get a notification through Deputy via their smartphone, or see it on the Deputy Kiosk. Once they’ve completed the task, the manager is notified in the same way. It saves a lot of miscommunication and helps us work more efficiently.

It’s also great to use Deputy to make announcements or share company news because you can be one hundred percent sure that everyone has got the message. It’s all online and fully accessible via their mobile devices.