Iowa State University Bookstore Turns To Humanity For Their Employee Scheduling Solutions

Serving the community for over 130 years, the Iowa State University Bookstore has been catering to the needs of faculty, students and staff.

Originally a small room in Beardshear Hall, the Iowa State University didn’t have a need for a vast bookstore where students and faculty alike could go to study, read, or buy required texts. The completion of the steam motor line from Ames to the University increased university population and opened up the need for a bookstore and a post office. The result was a small counter operation that ran for 66 years until 1958 when it was moved to the Memorial Union for expansion – thus opening up a variety of new services. As the University grew, the required space to operate the bookstore nearly doubled. By 2007 the bookstore itself had been completely renovated and was now more than twice its original size. This expansion allowed for the bookstore to handle the needs of the 30,000 proud Iowa State Cyclones.

Fully staffed with 26 full-time employees, 85 part-time employees and 25 seasonal employees, the Iowa State University Bookstore needed a workforce management system that handled the complex schedules and requests of its student employees. Like many universities, bookstores primarily focus on hiring students attending the University. As you can imagine, the range of different class schedules and extracurricular activities made arranging shifts that corresponded to the individual student schedules incredibly difficult.

With Humanity’s unique ability to allow employees to post their availability within our application, Humanity’s software auto-generates a list of employees who are available for specific shifts. The ability to trade shifts easily between employees made restructuring and scheduling incredibly easy.

With the amount of time spent scheduling significantly reduced, managers can now spend more time helping students and fewer hours scheduling employees in correspondence with their schedules.