How Homebase can streamline your shift swapping policy
- Employees who can’t work a certain shift can request a shift swap with a colleague
- With Homebase scheduling, business owners and managers can approve or deny shift swaps right from their mobile app
- Employees can also use the team communication feature to speed up the process of finding an employee to cover shifts for them, making the shift swap process easy and efficient
What is a shift swap?
A shift swap occurs when a team member wants to trade shifts with a colleague on the work schedule if the shift timing does not work for them.
The worker can offer shifts to another employee with a shift swap request form, and if the employee and manager accept the swap, the employee who initiated the shift trade can then request to work one of the scheduled shifts of their colleague.
Without the proper staff scheduling software or shift swap template, managing shift swapping can be tedious and a headache for both employees and their managers. However, with Homebase scheduling, you as the manager can approve or deny shift swaps right from your mobile app and your employees will be notified instantly.
What happens when employees submit a shift swap request?
Instead of using a difficult shift swap request email format or complicated shift swap form template, swapping shifts at work is much more manageable for employees because they can do it all from the Homebase app. And even better, you as the manager can approve or deny the shifts from your mobile or web app as well.
An employee must initiate a shift trade before you can approve or deny it. To do so, they open the employee scheduling app on Homebase and tap Schedule in the navigation bar.
Then, they will select My Shifts, after which they need to tap on Find Cover next to the shift they would like to trade. After selecting Trade Shift, the employee will need to select either a specific teammate they would like to trade with, or they can choose to offer the shift to all employees.
If they do not want to actually trade the shift and instead simply want the shift to be covered, they can tap Request Cover and again will have the option to select one employee or the entire team. After they click Submit, the request for approval will instantly be sent to the selected teammates and the manager and wait for approval.
As soon as the shift trade is requested, whether it’s a day or night shift, you will receive a notification in your dashboard or on the app. Then you will need to sign in on the web or open your app on your mobile device to review the requested shift trade.
Reviewing and approving or denying the request is as simple as signing into your account online or in your app and tapping More. In the Requests tab, you will be able to see all the shift swap requests that your employees have submitted. You can select each request and select approve or deny to finish the review.
How does Homebase make it easy to swap a shift?
Homebase makes it easy to swap shifts with the simple feature in the mobile app, giving employees the luxury of not having to use sample request letters to request a shift trade among colleagues.
However, Homebase offers another feature that makes the shift swapping process even smoother: team communication. Employees can message specific colleagues or the entire team to ask if someone would be willing to trade shifts or cover open shifts, without having to search for phone numbers or send an email.
While shift swapping can be difficult without the right software, the features Homebase’s employee schedule maker offers speeds up shift trading for both you and your employees, whether you operate on rotating shifts, predictive scheduling, or any other type of scheduling template. This means your team has a better chance of making their schedule work for them.
You can also use employee shift schedule templates to automate your scheduling, and you can edit the weekly schedule template to fit your employees’ needs based on regular shift swapping that you see come through on your schedule planner.
