Are you or your managers burnt out? Feeling like you work three jobs at once? Exhausted from covering shifts due to the labor shortage? The time-saving tips below can help. These tips come from experts on the TimeForge team who know the ins-and-outs of operations, HR, and IT.
7 Time-saving tips from the TimeForge team
If you manage employees, many of your most time-consuming tasks are tedious and repetitive. The good news is: these tasks can often be automated. That’s why most of the tips below focus on automation; it’s the best way to ensure you have more time to spend supporting your team and keeping customers happy.
Tip 1: Allow department managers to create schedules in TimeForge
“One of the biggest time-saving tips in my book is allowing department managers, such as the Deli manager or Bakery manager, to create schedules in TimeForge,” says Mike Hetisimer, our Implementations Specialist. “Sometimes, a business will require its department managers to write down their schedule, then give that schedule to a store manager to key into TimeForge.
But in fact, TimeForge was designed to allow collaboration and review of schedules before they’re posted. With our robust permissions, businesses can grant their department managers access to create schedules in TimeForge, then store managers can simply review and post them!”
Tip 2: Enable automatic clock-outs
Diego Gaytan, our Support Team Lead, recommends enabling automatic clock-outs.
“Setting up an auto clock-out time for entries where an employee does not record an out-punch can save managers a significant amount of time,” he says. “Auto clock-outs are easy to find on the Manage Attendance page with the page’s filter. If you select Clocked Out by Schedule, you can easily find entries you’d need to update to reflect the actual time the employee should have clocked out.”
“Also, by setting up auto clock-outs, managers won’t have to clock out employees from a timeclock or on the website,” adds Diego. “This can cut down on the time a manager has to spend at the timeclock or digging through attendance entries in order to clock someone out.”
Tip 3: Delegate certification tracking to TimeForge
“My advice is to treat TimeForge as a trusted virtual employee that can offload the more mundane and time-consuming aspects of management,” says Erik, our Chief Technology Officer. “A great example of this is certifications. TimeForge can track certifications for you and automatically send reminders to managers and employees prior to a certification’s expiration.”
If a cert does expire, TimeForge can warn a manager during scheduling. TimeForge can also prevent an employee from clocking into their shift. (This is known as certification enforcement.) These features ensure that a business always remains in compliance, and they save managers a great deal of time. TimeForge automatically handles all the emails, tracking, reminders, and calendar dates.
Tips 4 & 5: Automate repetitive tasks, such as shift reminders
Erik added, “Another example of making TimeForge work for you is with shift confirmations and reminders. The principle is the same. Instead of having to reach out to employees constantly to make sure they can make their shifts, you can offload that work to TimeForge. This can save you a ton of time that you would spend writing emails, text messages, or playing phone tag.”
To see what kind of personal alerts are possible from the employee profile, click here. In TimeForge, alerts are set from the employee profile page. Just click your name in the upper right corner of the application, then select the Alerts tab.
To set up shift confirmations, make sure “Confirm Scheduled Shifts” is set to “Yes” under the location settings. You can also choose whether to prompt employees on the day of or multiple times. You can also choose to be notified about things like short staffing on this page.
Tip 6: Automate labor law compliance
Similar to the time-saving tips above, TimeForge can automate the complex rules of labor law compliance. It even does so proactively. Meaning, it will prevent non-compliant schedules and automatically pay out predictability pay as required by law. This not only saves managers time but protects the business from costly fines. You can also enable things like bid shifts and shift swaps, which are great for compliance as well as saving time.
Tip 7: Take advantage of our free annual account wellness check
Daniel Fernandez, our Senior Software Engineer, recommends a yearly account wellness check. These checkups are a great opportunity to make sure your account is following best practices, as well as getting the most out of the features available to you. “Our labor management experts will review your account and offer suggestions on what you can do to save more time and automate your tasks,” he says. “There is no extra charge; this checkup is completely free to customers.”
To take advantage of the TimeForge team’s expert advice, just give us a call or send us an email. We’ll happily set up a meeting to review your account and go over best practices with you.
