Tips & Tricks: Adding On-Call Employees to Shifts

One of the most difficult aspects of scheduling your employees is aligning the assignments you make with the needs of your business. One way you can solve this is adding on-call employees to your employee work schedule.

It can be pretty difficult to forecast your work schedule perfectly to always have the exact number of staff members you need working at that particular time.

As a business owner, you are trying to find a perfect balance. You don’t want to overstaff your shifts if you don’t need to, but at the same time, you don’t want to get caught being unexpectedly understaffed.

Both possible outcomes can cost your business a lot of money. Being overstaffed means that you are essentially paying staff members you don’t need to pay because there is not enough work to go around for all of the employees who are assigned to work on a particular shift.

When you are understaffed, you are losing money by providing inadequate service to your customers since you don’t have enough employees to serve the number of customers that need to be served.

To avoid overstaffing your shifts, you are probably going to have to rely on data, reports and your general knowledge regarding how busy your place of work historically gets and on particular days of the week and times of the day.

Making sure that your business is never understaffed is a bit easier.

One way you can do this using Humanity is adding on-call employees to your scheduled shifts.

How does that work? It’s simple. You can have your regularly scheduled employees on the shift and then add a couple of on-call employees who will be essentially on notice in case they are needed.

This means that if the shift turns out to be unexpectedly busy, you can easily reach out to your on-call employees to get them to come in and help out.

These employees will keep themselves available for that shift just in case, even though they won’t be coming into work unless they are called on to do so.

This method also saves managers a lot of stress and time. If they do need to add more people to work the shift in a hurry, they don’t have to waste time trying to figure out who is available and calling them to see if they can come in. Managers can simply notify the staff members listed as being on-call and let them know that they are needed to come in and help out.

Setting up On-Call Staff Management

First, make sure the option for OnCall Management is enabled under the account settings: Settings > ShiftPlanning > OnCall Management.

Click on the shift to which you want to assign on-call employees.

To hand out on-call assignments, click on the phone icon to the right of the staff members to whom you want to give on-call assignments and then click on “Save & Close.”

Once you republish the shift with these new on-call assignments included, all the employees who you have listed as being on-call will be notified of their new statuses.

If you click on the shift again, you will clearly see which employees are designated as being on-call.

Happy Scheduling!