We’re strapped down working on the next version release of Roster Plus, and that means some intense virtual collaboration has been going on, which could only happen with the use of cloud-based applications. Here’s the stuff we use every day.

A Mockingbird in the hand…

Like whiteboards on steroids, Mockingbird provides a platform where multiple users can quickly draw and argue over the design of anything from a user interface layout to a process flow – in real time. It hits the perfect balance of being simple and accessible enough to dive into on a creative whim while being customisable enough to construct almost anything you dream up.

Even the apparent limitation from the finite amount of ‘widget’ types that Mockingbird allows you to work with can also be overcome with a little out-of-the-box (out-of-the-widget?) thinking…for instance, assembling diagonal lines out of a series of grouped vertical or horizontal lines. Or assembling a clock icon out of a square, a circle, some lines, and some precise mouse movements.

The entirety of our new user interface is being meted out in iterative group design bursts over Mockingbird. Ideas and accompanying demonstrations about how a toolbar could sit or a record could display can be realised instantly with a few mouse clicks over the cloud and some animated talking over the top of the computer screen.

Google driving it

Drafting of blogs, help texts and manuals, updating of progress spreadsheets and everyone’s ratings of different coffee bean types is all handled using the Google Drive suite.

To keep track of the next version’s progress, we have a master spreadsheet that has been set up to calculate progress percentages for each task needed to reach each final screen of the new version: from wireframing it, to writing the help text for it, to designing and scripting it. Team members update the progress of their task on each page in each corresponding cell, which updates the aggregate percentage for that phase of work, which updates the total progress percentage figure, which leads to excitement.

When a blog post, a web page, or some service-related documentation is being written, debate over the phrasing of a sentence can be helped along with demonstrative typing. Though admittedly it’s a bit creepy when you see another cursor zooming around eating up and spitting out your words, it does make you wonder how people used to do it only a few years ago by emailing documents back and forth.

Asanarama

Every business-related task we want to track from fixing bugs to buying pot plants is managed through Asana’s easy and powerful tasking system. By some act of wizardry, Asana has been designed so that everything you need to see about a work task is there, and everything you don’t want to see but other tasking programs usually show isn’t. The lack of rigidity about how you can go about creating and managing tasks is great too, as it lets you quickly map tasks and then get back to work instead of getting lost in the process of processing a process.

With an exponential increase in collaborative software tools in the cloud and their becoming steadily more accessible, powerful and affordable (even free!), one often wonders what’s next. Maybe in five years we’ll be collaborating using heads-up display contact lenses and brainwaves. Until then, happy rostering!

We’ve wound down signups until the first of June so we can focus on bringing you our next major version implementation. For the rest of April and for all of May, we will be knuckling down on making sure that the next version or Roster Plus will allow for even less time spent and hair pulled over the realities of rostering employees, and more time spent on running your organisation (and maybe even doing what you love, too).

Of course, full support is still here for our existing clients during this time – even though we find our clients don’t really call us much with support questions as the system is already easy to master.

Here’s a quick peek at what you can look forward to:

New Interface – A new, slick, easy-to navigate interface will find you blazing through your rostering tasks.

New Features – Award interpretation, leave costing, pay cycle processing, facial recognition for clocking, interactive reporting, more powerful payroll exporting…more tasks that you previously handled on other systems – or maybe in your head! – can be bundled into one place on our service.

New Guidance – Thorough in-program support and guiding documentation will see you solving your own questions and forging ahead from the start, with less time spent on the phone or in email.

If you’ve come to us looking for a solution to your rostering woes during our period of transition, well have a page where you can leave your details put up soon so that you can be assured that we will come running on the first of June to share our excitement with you over our new creation.

It’s not often I sit staring at a gigantic version of our logo, pondering what our tagline really means. Fortunately, our recent office move afforded me such an opportunity and it couldn’t of come at a better time.

First lets rewind a couple of weeks. We’d been looking to move out of the co-space in South Melbourne we currently worked from into some space we could comfortably grow in and make our own. Together with our mates (and clients) at The White Tree we decided to take an awesome two story place in Richmond. Being the typical hacker / entrepreneur I am, I quickly decide none of the desks for sale anywhere were quite what I wanted, so I would build my own from scratch. It was this kind of ‘how hard can it be’ thinking that got me into the rostering business some 4 years ago. When will I ever learn…..

I became obsessed with every  detail of the ‘office development process’, from the pots I would sit our plants in (I care for office plants now?!?) to the how closely the microwave I ordered would match the bin it would be near. Building the desks led me to in-depth research and planning on the types of screws I would use and where I would position them to maximise strength but minimise visibility. I developed a production lines, pondered the flow and feng shui (not really, but maybe I should have?) of the layout and thought long into the night on how I could make the space a comfortable, professional and ultimately a ‘cool’ place to work. It wasn’t hard to draw parallels between the office build and the company I planned to run from it but there wasn’t much time to sit and contemplate them all. There were problems to solve and features to complete.

ANYWAY, back to the question, what does our tagline ‘Smarter Rostering. Happier Workplace.’ really mean? Well to me they aren’t two separate statements. Anything which you strive to do smarter in your workplace will make you and your employees happier.

Some pictures of the build!

]]> http://rosterplus.com.au/happier-workplace/feed/ 0 http://rosterplus.com.au/trial-software-at-your-own-pace/ http://rosterplus.com.au/trial-software-at-your-own-pace/#comments Thu, 28 Mar 2013 05:42:13 +0000 Al http://rosterplus.com.au/?p=1552 Read More »]]>

Lately we’ve been brainstorming the task and email flow we use to court and progress triallers to permanent online rostering adicts (clients). Redesigning how our admin system detects and alerts us to usage patterns, so we can help guide each one to conversion, at their own pace.

While doing this we delved deep into our sales pipeline statistic and found our small and medium business triallers are a mixed bunch. There isn’t any set pattern to how a trialler transitions to a subscriber. We get a varied response. For business relationships, they have oddly personal touches.

Some dive in eagerly at first, adding staff and publishing rosters, only to disappear completely, then reappear weeks or months later by suddenly raising an invoice. Others we never hear from again. Some need their hands held and plenty of soothing reassurance at first, involving many excited phone calls and emails, but soon can make their regular roster with their eyes closed, and they fall out of contact…but in a good way. Others with some uncanny inborn talent simply sign up, politely decline any support or contact, and get down to the business of making rosters, subscribing all on their own. We like these ones. Some are shy, some are wary and want to shop around and need you to sell it to them, and others are just so delighted that they’ve found exactly what they wanted that written communication will be littered with exclamation marks and smilies.

All these instances can’t be covered by a fixed two week trial period, which is why we are pretty flexible with making sure that each trialler gets the equivalent amount of time to give us a go. But we’re making official the changes to our system so all future triallers will be able to get their proper two-weeks use out of our product. From now one, we are making the trial period two weeks from the date they first create their roster. This way users can experience two weeks of actual use of the product, even if it takes a little longer to get everything together.

Our Enterprise clients, well they’re a different story. Throw six months, ten departments, thirty meetings and 1,000 emails at it and you are getting close to what’s needed to get them over the line. But that’s a blog for another day…

Roster, schedule and rota are the three most common English terms for employee time management systems, with one term commonly favoured over the others between English speaking countries. The standard in Australia is roster, with schedule being less common and rota rarely used. In the UK, all three are used, with rota being more common. In the US, schedule is the favourite. We did a little investigation into the word history (etymology) of these three words and found a few interesting points.

The noun roster has a lot more to do with food that it has to do with plotting time management. The English roster is derived from the Dutch noun rooster, which was inherited from Middle Dutch roosten. Interestingly, roosten was an old Dutch verb for ‘cook’, so the connection between it and rooster – a name for the grid of iron you lay over a fire or place in the oven to cook – is clearly logical. But how did the word jump from the culinary to the management world as it jumped from Dutch to English? Apparently the traditional grid-style table that employee shifts were drafted onto reminded people of the gridiron that people cooked on. Perhaps the adoption of roster in the early eighteenth century occurred during a time when people in the Netherlands and England thought more about their stomach than their watch.

The evolution of schedule is a bit more straightforward- from the Greek skhida – “splinter” – which led to the Latin schida and schedula – the former for the strips of plant matter that were hammered together to form papyrus, and in time, the latter for the strips of paper themselves. This was inherited in the French cedule which led to the English noun we know today. The British English soft c pronunciation is due to French inheritance, while the U.S. English hard c pronunciation is thanks to the efforts of the patriotic Noah Webster – of dictionary fame – who encouraged a return to the Greek style k sound so as to differentiate the New World language from its oppressive British roots.

The difference between roster and rota sounds small, but etymologically it’s large. Rota stems from the same word in Latin which stands for wheel, indicating the cyclical nature of week-to-week time management.

We can only suppose how each became the dominant term in each country. Perhaps the Latin-speaking Roman heritage of ancient Britain led to rota being favoured, while the secessionist mindset of the United States saw them adopt the schedule alternative. And maybe Australians just liked the way roster sounded. Who knows? We’ll have to track down an etymologist…

Every online rostering system provider (including ours!) works hard to spell out every benefit under the sun of a web based system, but often we fail to mention what you will miss. We thought this blog post would be a good way to help prepare you for the things you will have to say goodbye to:

Pen, paper and whiteout…and maybe printer ink

Traditionalists might argue that you can’t physically touch an online roster: something you draft up or print out just feels more real and concrete. In actuality, it may not be. Rosters are almost always dynamic things, and unless staff are constantly checking the piece of paper on the break room wall, or unless you are constantly reminding them to in light of changes (both time wasters), there are always going to be those confusions where staff are turning up when not needed, or not turning up when needed. If you have a fast-paced and flexible workplace like many of our clients, constantly adjusting the same piece of paper (where you use pencil and can correct things) just looks messy.

When you can cleanly correct shifts with clicks and keystrokes, and message changes instantly to staff and managers, you may begin to wonder how you ever rostered beforehand. If you really want that piece of paper, you can export and print rosters from the sysem…but after a while you may even give up this habit. You’d be surprised.

Comparing pieces of paper or clicking between excel spreadsheets

When you change hours on your roster, you have to scribble or type in the changes on your budget. Because you want to distribute hours fairly amongst your casuals, you have to check last week’s roster to see if Tom worked more hours than Harry, and give Harry his due this time. Shelley works between your store and another location under your business, so you have to check she isn’t rostered on there for shifts you allocate her here. Sure, its hands on, but is this use of your time really efficient?

When all rostering information is virtual, all these problems are immediately visible and recognisable to you, on the one screen and in the one system. It just saves time, lowers costs, and makes confusion a whole lot less likely.

Calling your staff

Do you like calling around when you have a spare shift, or worse, when an employee pulls out of one? Do your employees like receiving these calls? Not only is this practice intrusive, it’s inefficient: usually you will have to call at least five of your staff before someone accepts. And what happens when a less effective staff member accepts when a more skilled one would have said yes?

You can avoid these pitfalls swiftly and discreetly with a group SMS or email message. And if more than one person is available to cover, you can choose who you know will be the best fit.

A rainbow of highlighters, post it notes and sticky tape; other roster art

Many new users think web based rostering can be austere, with not much option for customisation in the form of colouring different shifts. In the long run this eliminates distraction, and saves colour changes and alerts for when things truly need your attention. If you really can’t give up the highlighter, you can always print the roster out and go crazy in your own time.

Scribbling out memos and reminders for later

Initial setup may look a little daunting to first-time users, but investing a little time now can reap hours of time saved in the future. Once all the correct information is in the system, you will never have to copy it out again, and the system will be able to crunch the data in seconds as opposed to minutes you would spend cross- and double-checking.

When business processes change, online rostering forces you to log on and change your settings to reflect them. This makes you act now rather than leaving the task to pop up later and cause even greater inconvenience. Taking the initiative now is a healthy habit!

Roster Plus can help you avoid a great deal of staffing pitfalls that come with the territory of operating in the restaurant industry. On our website we have some great resources for best practices when it comes to rostering for hospitality, and here we want to show how small differences in settings and practices can add up to big differences in time spent rostering or chasing employees.

Getting Areas & Roles right

Running across several sites, or just the one labour of love? Do you roster centrally, or does each manager do the roster for their store? The size and scope of your restaurant or restaurants is a prime consideration when setting up Areas and Roles in Roster Plus.

If you only have the one location, Areas can be setup to more specific subdivisions within your restaurant such as Kitchen, Floor and Bar, with employee roles being defined under these areas. This setup can also be implemented under multiple Roster Plus registrations if your business manages restaurants in multiple locations and if each restaurant manager creates the roster for their area.

Alternatively, If you are rostering centrally for several restaurants, each physical location can be entered as an Area on one Roster Plus account, with employee roles being grouped under these areas. Role descriptions can indicate further subdivisions particular to a certain restaurant.

Customise Alerts to keep within legislation

Federal, State, Local and Industry specific legislation all dictate how to lawfully roster hours for your employees. Be sure to review where your restaurant stands, and then adjust your Company Settings (maximum hours per roster, maximum consecutive days worked and minimum hours between rostered shifts) to get Roster Plus to automatically generate alerts if you happen to roster outside best practices.

Tweak staff permissions to best suit the management style of your business

Some restaurants operate like a tight-knit family, while others may need a little more management hands-on. It’s important to set your permissions to reflect how closely you manage your employees.

If you are confident with your staff members’ abilities to organise amongst themselves, you can allow them to swap, drop and pickup shifts and submit leave requests without management intervention. Or, if you follow a more hands-on management style, you can authorise these actions yourself, or even disable the option to engage them completely from the Company Settings screen.

Define your Publishing style…

Do you want to know to whom all shifts are allocated before you release the roster, or are you comfortable with staff being able to pick up shifts after roster publication? Roster Plus gives you option to release your roster with unallocated shifts if you are confident that your staff will self-organise. Simply enable staff to pick up shifts from the Company Settings page, then go ahead and publish those unallocated shifts. Staff can log in and assign themselves with or without your permission depending on how you want to set it up.

… and use the Fill-in Finder and Shift Reminders to help cover shifts

Turning on shift reminders in Company Settings will send an SMS or email to staff due to work the following day, and if there’s a night-before dropout, or just an unstaffed shift that you’re getting a little anxious about, you can advertise the shift to all or certain staff members using the Fill-In Finder. Don’t forget to set whether you want staff to receive messages after hours or not, depending on the situation!

If you adjust your settings and practices in Roster Plus to the context and management style of your restaurant, everything just goes a whole lot smoother! For more rostering tips check out our top tips for rostering.

The rapid adoption of web services has seen a shift in hospitality software to online, mobile capabilities, which smart managers are adopting in order to automate tasks that take time away from the effective running of their businesses.

Benefits don’t just apply to efficiency and profit margins – transitioning hospitality software systems to online, cloud-based applications is making staff happier, too. With over three quarters of employees under the age of 34, hospitality workers tend to be younger, value a flexible work/study/life balance and embrace emerging technologies. Online and mobile capabilities are making it easy to bridge many communication and logistic pitfalls that have previously plagued businesses that depend on their labour.

Let’s review four cloud-based services that a smart restaurant, bar or cafe might use to keep things running seamlessly while saving time and money, as well as increasing both customer and staff satisfaction.

Xero for everything accounting

Your attendance, timesheets and sales records can feed automatically into this online accounts management service, where all data can be easily accessed by all parties involved. Your accounts manager and your accountant can find what they need without superfluous phone calls and emails, while invoices for event clients can be generated and distributed instantly.

MyGuestlist for customer relations, promotions and social media

Access all information about your events, guest lists, ticketing and social media campaigns from one dashboard. Create online guest lists that can be accessed and edited by you or your patrons online, avoiding last minute confusions over additions. Customer interactions with your business on social media sites are automatically added to your contact database. Reservations and custom ticketing for events can be created and managed online.

Vend for dynamic point-of-sale

Turn any computer or tablet into a point of sale device. Use the same laptop or tablet that you clocked staff in on to ring up sales without having to handle cumbersome hardware. Get orders to the kitchen instantly with wait staff entering them directly from their tablet device at the table. Custom receipts can be emailed to customers.

Roster Plus for painless employee scheduling, attendance, timesheets and reports

Make communication between staff and managers easy with messaging and shift change capabilities. Managers don’t have to be on the office computer to create and publish rosters. Staff can respond remotely via text or email from their phone. Clock in and clock out can be done from any laptop or tablet device, whether it be from your restaurant or at a one-off event location. With permissions, staff can swap, pickup and drop shifts without having to come in to work. Using the online discussion and download areas you can keep staff updated and provide anywhere-access to documentation.

These are just a few of our favorite pieces of online hospitality software. If you have found more you would recommend, let us know!

Cut back on time spent on meetings and spend more time growing your business. The discussions area of Roster Plus allows you, your managers and your employees to communicate and collaborate, without having to take time out of work to do so.

Managers and staff can contribute from home or even their mobile devices. Staff who may be too shy to voice their opinions in person can be empowered by having the option to present their views in writing.

New posts can be targeted as either open discussions or closed announcements, and you can choose what audience you want to see the your message.

1. Employee collaboration and feedback on company policy

Staff who have a say in how procedure affects them will naturally feel more positive on the job. Make your staff feel empowered by asking for their opinion.

2. Reminders and updates

Seeing an emerging problem with employee break times, or has the dress code been sliding with a few of your staff? Remind and encourage employee compliance by posting an announcement.

3. Brainstorming product, service or procedure ideas

Harness the ideas of your employees by encouraging them to suggest new ways to approach business. By having an open brainstorming thread, you never know what innovations may be born.

4. Organising company events

Whether it’s the annual Christmas party or retirement drinks, you can settle the debate about venue, date and dress code online, without cutting into company time.

5. Milestones, end-of-year messages and the like

Passed the 100 client mark, or do you want to thank your employees for their efforts during the year? Memorialise important developments and dates by posting a sticky to the message board.

As of today, we have deployed our new streamlined billing system across all user accounts.

The new Billing Overview page may be accessed via the Account > Billing menu. If you log into a currently expired account you will be instantly directed to this page.

Highlights of the new billing system include:

• Integrated Credit Card gateway with instant order processing
• Single account balance for subscription and SMS
• Ability to prepay as much balance as you like
• A flat rate SMS credit rate of 15c (previously only available when buying 5,000+ SMS)
• SMS usage visulisation

Your account balance and payment method, SMS usage, recent orders and payments are now displayed in a dashboard view.

FAQs

What will happen to my existing SMS credits?
Existing SMS credits on your account will be converted into your Account Balance at the rate of 15 cents per credit.

What if I don’t want to subscribe?
You can still pay-as-you-go by making one-time payments to top up your account balance. The system will still automatically charge your account balance every month, and will send you an email notification if there is insufficient credit available to complete a transaction.

Why can’t I choose my payment amount any more?
Your subscription charge is now automatically calculated based on how many unique staff you rostered in the past month.