Shift Scheduling Software for Public Safety & Public Utilities Workers

Employee shift scheduling for public safety agencies and public utilities presents many challenges. Making sure that each shift is properly staffed with the right number of crews and workers is one of the hardest tasks that schedulers and operations managers face.  Public safety and public utilities workers typically work 24/7 using a wide range of shift configurations, from 8-hour, 10-hour, 12-hour, fixed and rotating days and night shift, to 24-hour shift. 

Union and FLSA rules place restrictions on work hours, consecutive work days, overtime compensation, as well as the types of work schedules that can be implemented. Schedulers must keep track of training assignments, compensatory time, off time and know when part-time or floaters will be available for work. Complex schedules and last minute changes can make dispatcher and public safety officer scheduling difficult and when necessary, schedulers must find qualified backup and on-call personnel to fill a shift as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Our Snap Schedule employee shift scheduling software helps public safety agencies and public utilities save significant time, resources, and costs. It offers several different shift schedule views designed to accommodate a variety of scheduling styles and shift patterns. With point-and-click scheduling ease, it warns you of scheduling conflicts, ensures policy enforcement and union compliance, calculates overtime, extra duty pay, and shift premium costs of each shift, finalizes pay sheets for payroll, and allows you to easily publish and distribute shift schedules electronically to workers.

Using spreadsheets, documents, online calendars, or paper to schedule employees may be familiar. Perhaps it’s the way your organization has always done personnel scheduling. While these methods may be sliding by, they lack the capabilities and features needed to increase efficiency, reduce labor costs, and promote employee work-life balance.

Snap Schedule Scheduling Capabilities

Snap Schedule Employee Scheduling Software helps public utility companies meet these challenges. It is packed with powerful employee scheduling features and gives you instant access to key decision-making criteria, including staffing requirements, regular, overtime and on-call hours, labor costs, employee skills and certifications, employee availability and preferences, and more.

Easily schedule an unlimited number of crews and workers

• Apply fair and equitable shift schedules and rotation rules among workers.
• View visual, color coded alerts based on continuous-conflict checking and dynamic staffing hours and costs totals.
• Drag & drop to easily assign shifts, mark time off, move or copy assignments.
• For each shift, line-up on-call or stand-by workers for emergency situations.
• View assignments and schedule workers from three different views. Use whichever view is easiest and most effective for your scheduling tasks.
• Create rolling, fixed, rotating shift schedules – from days to years.
• Set multiple work limits to give a warning when a worker is about to be scheduled for more than a certain number contiguous hours and/or hours per week or pay period.
• Software automatically generates 8hr, 10hr, 12hr, and 24hr work schedules using industry standard shift configurations or user-definable schedule plans. Preview work schedules and make changes as necessary.

Improve communications by empowering employees with online scheduling self-service access

Available online 24 hours a day/7 days a week and accessible to employees whether at work or at home, Snap Schedule 365 self-service features cut scheduling and administrative time by making employees more pro-active in the process.

• View Work Schedules: View employee's shift assignments, time-off, shift trades as well as co-workers’ work schedules. From this planner, employees can filter what they want to see, request time off, bid on open shifts, and trade or pick up shifts from co-workers.
• Request Time Off: Employees can make time off/vacation requests, and schedulers can track, manage, approve, or deny those requests. Employees can see the approval status and are automatically alerted when their request is approved or rejected via an in-app notification.
• Trade/Pick Up Shifts: Allow shift trading between employees with or without a scheduler’s approval. Employees can post their assigned shifts to trade with coworkers who are eligible to work the shifts.
• Punch In/Out: Employees can punch in and out of their assigned shifts, and schedulers can see the punch data in real-time in the Punch view or run reports to see the variances between planned vs. actual work hours and costs for any date range.
• Self-scheduling with Open Shifts: Empower employees by letting them self-schedule with open shifts. Schedulers can simply create an open shift for a position and specify the number of employees needed and the required skills.
• View Time Card Information: Employees can view their planned and actual work hours for the current, previous, or next payroll cycle. On-call, overtime, paid and unpaid time-off hours are also presented.
• Look Up Coworkers: Employees can look up coworker’s contact information to call, text, or email. Schedulers decide whom to include or exclude from the directory.
• Update Availability: Save time and stay up-to-date by allowing employees to update their own contact information and availability. Employees can enter their availability information for each day of the week, and in multiple time segments as needed.

Personnel & certification tracking

• Keep complete records of available workers, full-time or part-time staff, float or per-diem staff.
• Systematically track skills, certifications, training classes, and licenses.
• Monitor expiration or renewal dates for certification and notify workers and management of pending expirations.
• Use Snap Schedule’s 25 customizable fields in each employee record to track information that is unique to your operation.

Quickly and efficiently fill an open shift or find a substitute

• Quickly find and call out a substitute worker to fill a no-show or last minute absence.
• Set priorities for the order in which worker should be called in to fill a shift or an emergency. Tell Snap Schedule shift scheduling software your criteria and it will show you a ranked list of available candidates to fill a shift. Ranking can be based on many criteria including job position, skills, availability, labor cost, work hour limits, seniority, and more.

Work around your schedule constraints with ease

• Define each worker’s availability, desired work hours, daily work hour constraints, and weekly work hour constraints.
• The Schedule Planner alerts you to availability conflicts, duplicate shift assignments, overlapped shift assignments, and conflicts with scheduled time off.
• The Daily Assignment Validation report identifies all discrepancies and constraint violations.

Manage labor costs and avoid over/under staffing

• Set overtime, FSLA, and shift premium pay policies for your organization.
• Define hourly cost, overtime exempt status and work hour constraints for each employee.
• Use the Shift Coverage planner to monitor under/over staffing conditions based on position, skill, and assignment reason.
• Adjust employees' shift assignment start time, end time, and payable hours as necessary to reflect actual work hours.
• Standard reports provide labor cost details and summary data associated with the schedules you created over any specified period.
• Use the software to export labor cost data for payroll and accounting purposes.

Easily publish work schedules

• Print schedule views, lists, rosters, shift assignment calendars, and reports to communicate schedule information to management and workers.
• Easily publish work schedules, calendars, and reports in PDF and a variety of other formats.
• Automatically email work schedules (in text or iCalendar file format) to workers and/or their supervisors.