A common pain point for managers occurs when staff submit unavailability after the roster has been completed and published. Having to go back to the roster, make changes and re-publish it can be annoying and confusing to staff.

To help prevent this situation we’ve always had minimum days’ notice setting for unavailability:

This setting works okay, however it doesn’t factor in if the roster has been published further in advance than the minimum number of days notice. Let’s say you have a minimum notice period of 14 days but you have published rosters 3 weeks out (21 days) then you wouldn’t want staff to submit unavailability as this would require the manager to go back and change the roster or tell staff that it won’t be accepted. Both of which take time. Instead, you would want them to request a shift cover.

For this reason, we’ve improved the way the unavailability notice works, so that it also factors in roster publishing.

How it works

When an employee goes to submit unavailability, Tanda will check whether their roster has been published yet for that date. If it has, they won’t be able to submit unavailability until the day after that roster ends.

The main thing to note here is that if the minimum days’ notice is greater than the last day of published rosters, this setting will be used instead. The reason for this is that we know many businesses have a policy around days notice (i.e you must give at least 14 days notice), which we felt was important to still respect regardless of the roster publishing.

This is what an employee would see in their app if they went to apply for unavailability within the lockout:

This update should reduce the number of manual changes a manager has to make after they publish their roster.

This should also encourage staff to get their unavailability entered earlier which is also going to make rostering in advance easier for managers.

The great news is if a manager does publish their roster and staff are no longer unavailable they can request a cover and a manager can easy approve the change without ever needing to go back and edit the roster.