Category: Administrators

What controls assignability in your rota?

There are a few things that interact to determine if someone in your workforce can be assigned to a shift in your rota.

Its important to distinguish between assignment and self-assignment. Both of these can work together to solve a rota and, as a hub admin, you can control these capabilities.

Assignment – where a hub admin assigns a shift to member of the hub workforce

Suitability

A number of factors affect a persons suitability to be assigned to a shift:

• Being the correct user type or role (in role based rotas)
• Having your staff user account enabled within the hub
• Having the core attributes of their profile completed (ready for work)
• Having any appropriate special capabilities (if a shift has a special type associated)
• The staff user has specified that they are willing to work at the location of the shift

The last item in this list is set by the staff user, in the hub management section of their account, per hub. Hubs can have multiple locations where rostered shifts are set and a staff user can specify which of these they wish to work at (or all of them).

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Availability

Availability can either be given explicitly or tacitly.

Explicit availability

This is what a staff user has set themselves as ‘available’ for days or segments of days, from within their Schedule screen.

Tacit availability

This is where a staff user is NOT unavailable. It does not require explicit availability but does require that a person is not working elsewhere.

Each hub can be configured to require staff user availability or not, in order to assign people to shifts. This is a choice between using explicit or tacit availability as the background to assigning staff to hub shifts.

This option is found in Hub settings.

/profile/manage_hub/

When this is ON, it means that staff users need to give their availability in their Schedule, via their app or account. Its fast and easy to do this but they need to keep it updated.

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Self-assignment – where a staff user assigns themselves to a shift in a hub rota, via their Schedule

For self-assignment to be available, the hub admin must ensure this is turned ON, in their hub settings and in the settings for the module that the rota is contained within. Modules also have settings so that different service rotas can be configured differently.

Hub settings

Module settings

Individual user suitability is still a factor in the same way as it is for assignment. Self-assignment is another optional workflow, available to the hub rota, that can work t

Controlling self-assignment at a shift level.

Within a rota, each individual shift can be given a self-assignment attribute (as long as self-assignment is ON for the module and hub)

Click the small icon of a person, bottom right, under the shift to open options.

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ASK for self-assignment

ASK is a 3rd workflow for a hub admin to use, that is based on self-assignment in that it will send a direct message via email and app push, to a specific staff user, selected by the hub admins (or multiple users), asking them to self-assign to the shift.

ASK can work even when self-assignment is not active for a rota or for a shift, which means it can be used in a very targeted, piecemeal way by a hub admin. When a hub admin sends multiple asks for the same shift, the staff user who self-assigns to the shift is first-come-first-served.

Hub settings

Any hub is highly configurable and can be be designed to work in a specific way, to support any service.

As well as this, there are many optional workflows that work independently or together. This allows hub administrators to design their own way of working.

/profile/manage_hub/

Manage a team of administrators

As a hub admin connected with your hub and with all permissions, you should see all the workforce in their user type groups

/hub_admin/workforce/employees/

Where, as a super admin, you can manage the other hub admins access and IG individually

Workforce user management

Not all user profile fields will be relevant to every hub service and only a few are required, in order to assign a user into a rota. Some relate to other types of relationship with a hub.

‘Ignore missing documents’ is required to be locked in order for a user to be assignable in a rota. If it is not locked then the user is required to upload all missing documents into their profile, from their end, in their account (app or desktop)

As an example, an IAS hub using the system and staffing it with flexible workers would probably not tick ‘ignore missing docs’ and instead use a rigorous process of document checking in order to bring all their staff into compliance for their service.

Your Hub admin team

As a hub admin with the highest level of admin rights, you can see and manage the permissions of the other hub admins for this hub

/hub_admin/permissions

These settings control their access to screens / features / information within the hub and can be quite useful. One such use is strict information governance. You may not need to do much here and just let your admins has lots of access.

Pay rates

In order for the system to be able to properly calculate costs and individual pay, we need to ensure we have setup pay rates in the hub.

The attached diagram explains the various places pay rates can be setup and how they will interact with each other to determine how much someone gets paid for a shift.

For a hub with no work plans (no internal staff users), the pay rates are simplified and only follow the route down one side of this diagram, via the ’Not in work plan’ route.

Standard pay rates are set for the hub here: /hub_admin/pay_rates/rates_and_fees

Special pay rates management is done via a button at the top of the standard pay rates page – ‘manage additional pay rate rules’

Special pay rules can comprise loads of rota dimensions and will over ride a standard pay rate, when the two coincide.

Custom user rates are found in each person profile in the workforce management screen and will over ride standard pay rates and most special rates

Lastly, within a rota, shifts can be given special pay rates (once they are assigned) as custom or pre-defined additional amounts

When working out the cost of a shift, the system can find the right rate, according to these rules.

Below the standard pay rate rules you will see the Standard employer rates and fees

Here, we can create a table of external employers for our staff and give each its own standard table of pay rates

In the workforce screen, we can assign a user an external employer

This can be useful to segment a hub workforce into different employers and calculate employer based costs for rotas and add additional costs associated

Invoices for self employed

Self-employed staff users will have an invoice auto generated at the start of each month for the previous month but we are soon to add a new hub config feature to allow a hub to set the frequency of self-employed auto invoice generation.

These auto generated invoices appear in the hub in this finance area and a searchable / filterable and can be downloaded and take part in basic reconciliation process

/invoicing/

Here also, a hub admin can generate missing invoices and regenerate incorrect ones. (This usually comes after some sort of fix, usually within a rota assignment)

There is also a complete assignment and pay history where payment calcs can be recalculated for individual shifts or in bulk

This sort of capability to repair costs calcs can serve a few purposes, including ensuring spending reports are accurate