Questions about scheduling part-time staff

Hi Elizabeth,

Apart from myself and the Box Office manager, our staff is entirely made up of SUNY Purchase students and recent graduates.  We normally schedule 2 weeks in advance, and keep an ongoing spreadsheet regarding their availability.  Once the schedule is printed and up, that’s it.  If something comes up, we require staff members to cover their own shifts and mark the changes on the schedule accordingly.  They have actually created a Facebook page where they can work out scheduling if need be.  This system has worked well for us – it saves aggravation and keeps staff on their toes.

I hope this helps!

Jessica

Jessica Damrow Sherman

Assistant Ticket Office Manager

The Performing Arts Center

Purchase College

735 Anderson Hill Road

Purchase, NY 10577

914.251.6214

jessica.damrow@purchase.edu

Hello,

I wondering about how you schedule your part-time staff.  How far in advance are you scheduling your staff (a week, a month, 6 months)? How frequently do you publish your schedule?  Do you require a general availability for a period of time (i.e. 6 months) or do you allow your staff to change availability between schedule periods? How do you handle shift changes and do you limit how many changes a staff member can make? Do you have any recommendations for scheduling/budgeting software?

As always, this information is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Elizabeth Carlock

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Warning. Pretty long email. But hopefully helpful.

We use When To Work (whentowork.com) for scheduling full-time and part-time staff. It is a web based program that is working really well for us. It allows us to flag what positions staff are trained in so we can schedule which office they are able to work. (Box Office vs Subscriptions vs Contact Center or if they are trainees.) If you want certain staff members for certain days, you can pre-enter them into the schedule, and then you can auto populate the rest.

We require at least 16 hours a week of availability from our staff, with at least 1 weekend day. Actual hours may range up to 30 hours for part time, and there is no minimum hours guaranteed. Shifts may rotate between morning and evening, and our offices are open during weekends and holidays. The latest evening shift starts at 5p, any later and they’re only coming in for maybe 2 hours or so which we want to avoid because it’s a pretty short shift. If we really need the staff though, and the staff member is ok with it, then we may schedule for short shifts. We require that their base availability and vacation requests are in writing so there’s no miscommunication and we can refer to it if there are any discrepancies.

Base availability is pretty much when they can work through the week.

Example:

Monday: Open Tuesday: 11:00 -closing Wednesday: Open Thursday: 12:00-9:00 Friday: Not available Saturday: 12:00-9:00 Sunday: 12:00-9:00

(Open means that you are available any time of the day)

They can change their base availability at any time, but we need the change in writing. They turn it in to the manager who will date and initial it, and this gets turned to our senior manager who does the actual scheduling.

Staff can put in time off (day off) requests, trade and drop shifts through W2W on their own.  We publish the new schedule a week in advance, usually by Wednesdays, but whenever there are changes to the schedule, we can republish it and it will send an email out. If they need time off for the following week, we ask that they let us know at least by the Tuesday before we publish the shift so we can update the schedule. Once it’s published, they’re responsible for the shift so they have to get someone else to pick it up through the trade board. Our staff also knows that nothing is confirmed until a manager approves the trade. We’ve had some confusion before when a staff member put their shift up on the trade board, and another picked up the shift. It was done late in the day so it wasn’t approved by a manager. The next day neither one showed up because the one giving up the shift thought the other was coming in and the one picking up didn’t see an approval from a manager so they didn’t come in. So until a shift change is approved, the original person scheduled is responsible for the shift.

They have a really good mobile site too. You can view the schedule, send messages (you can do this on the full website as well) to staff and management, and I believe you can trade shifts on there too. (I’m not sure about the latter.)

I know there’s a month of free trial available. Our current subscription is for up to 60 employees, and it looks like it’s $57/month if you do a month by month, but you get discounts if you pre-pay for a certain period.

With this information overload, I still don’t have all the information for this program, but I can direct you to our senior manager if you want to discuss this further. Just let me know.

Hope this helps!

~Karen

Please update your records to include my new e-mail address: KDiche@SCFTA.org
_______________________________________________________
Karen Diche
Manager, Season Tickets
Segerstrom Center for the Arts
600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, CA 92626
T (714) 556-2122 x 4359   F (714) 755-7477   E KDiche@SCFTA.org

Hello,

I wondering about how you schedule your part-time staff.  How far in advance are you scheduling your staff (a week, a month, 6 months)? How frequently do you publish your schedule?  Do you require a general availability for a period of time (i.e. 6 months) or do you allow your staff to change availability between schedule periods? How do you handle shift changes and do you limit how many changes a staff member can make? Do you have any recommendations for scheduling/budgeting software?

As always, this information is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Elizabeth Carlock

This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Ticketing Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Ticketing forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!