The holiday season is approaching quickly, and you’re building your Christmas schedules in preparation for the busiest time of year. You notice many of your casuals have added unavailability when you need them most. To make matters worse, your part-timers have applied for leave on the busiest days of the year!

What a nightmare! Luckily with Tanda, you can now add custom events to your schedule to help cater for demand and communicate blackout periods to your staff.

Keep track of events in your schedule

When building your schedule, you can view your upcoming events and schedule staff to cater for demand. On the Schedule/Roster tab, just click on the dropdown next to a day and select ‘Add a custom event’. Once the Custom Event has been added at star will appear next to the date.

If a ‘blocked’ symbol appears next to the star it means that the Custom Event was set to a blackout.

Communicate business needs to staff

When creating a custom event, you can flag it as a ‘blackout’ to discourage staff from applying for time-off on that day. With this setting on, staff will see a warning when applying for leave and unavailability that lets them know what events are occurring during that period and that time-off is discouraged.

Being transparent about your business needs to employees makes them feel more engaged with their workplace and less likely to submit a time off request during a blackout.

Warnings will be displayed on both leave and unavailability forms.

For employees to see these warning messages they need the latest version of the Tanda mobile app.