When an employee is sick or an unexpected event prevents them from coming in for their shift, you’re tasked with quickly finding someone to replace them.
What’s your current strategy?
It could be as simple as using an employee directory and dialing each number until someone says they can cover—but that’s time consuming. You may have taken it one step further with position-specific lists that only have qualified employees on them—but they may not have been updated in months and certifications could have expired. Automation is also an option.
For those of you looking to get away from paper processes but do not wish to automate the process entirely, we have good news: there is a happy medium. By digitizing your call out lists, you can both simplify the activity while creating the most comprehensive profiles and reports for future use.
Have a Proactive Call Out Plan
Perhaps the biggest issue with absence management is that so many companies have reactive measures in place. They only really think about how they are going to fill vacancies when a vacancy occurs.
But what if you created robust profiles and lists of employees to call for overtime and vacancy opportunities before you need to use them? That way, when an employee working a particular job can’t make it to their shift, you’ll easily be able to find the right list of qualified employees based on your unique rules.
With pre-configured lists, you can categorize them based on sortable and configurable attributes; it’s all about streamlining access to the right employee data. You have the ability to sort your lists by ‘OT Hours’, ‘Seniority’, ‘Preferences’, ‘Work Patterns’, and any other variable your organization deems necessary.
Easy-to-access data provides another perk besides being proactive. You can better manage your overtime process as well. You can properly distribute and manage OT hours based on specific work or union rules with the help of these customizable call-out lists. Manufacturing is an industry in particular that has a problem with overtime overages, so this can save money in the long term.
Increase Auditability
Now when you call employees with an overtime or vacancy request, keeping a running audit log of (1) the employees you call and (2) their responses have never been easier—or more organized! Having information stored in the cloud means that you will always have access to a specific employee’s comments and response record. Taking it a step further – Our Call Out Lists can freeze employee data whenever you start the call out process. You can ensure your log of employee responses is up-to-date and traceable no matter when you look back at it.
When you’re using paper or spreadsheets, you can certainly track what each employee says (or doesn’t say) for that specific job request. But you won’t notice trends across jobs since you aren’t filtering them by their name. For example, you may not realize that a person you were constantly leaving voicemails for has continuously used the excuse that they never received a voicemail.
And let’s say there is a union or employee grievance about never being asked for overtime. You can quickly search and confirm that they were indeed called.
The Indeavor Solution
With centralized call out data, you can provide organization-wide access to profiles and lists so anyone can use them when they need them. Translation: the burden of calling out for employee requests does not need to fall on one person.
It’s time to move on from separate processes that require re-entering information and instead focus on leveraging data that automatically saves for future use. It’s time for Indeavor.
Besides the automated scheduling, you can leverage our new Call Out List module that provides all of the above. Click here to request a demo.
Indeavor is our workforce management SaaS solution which offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling, time & attendance, and absence management system. Indeavor integrates with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems to create a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data.
