Skedulo Introduces: Work Offers

We are excited to introduce a new feature set that will empower your mobile employees to easily decide when and where they work. With Skedulo’s new Work Offers feature, companies have the flexibility to offer specific jobs or units of work to a group of workers who are available and qualified so they can self-select into what work they want the most. This powerful capability has been seamlessly added to existing scheduling workflows in Skedulo, so your business can take advantage of Work Offers with minimal change to your current processes.

Work Offers Give Your Business a New Tool to Manage On-demand Work and Empower Employees

Over the last decade, as innovative companies providing ride-sharing, delivery, home and specialty services made all of our lives easier, new ways of working also emerged, creating a new understanding of flexible working models for employees and individuals.

Work Offers capability in Skedulo reflects the changing dynamics of work and offers your business the opportunity to engage with your employees in ways that have, for most companies, been purely aspirational until now. Successful consumer-facing applications that provide on-demand, instantly gratifying products and services have inspired new models of employee engagement, in part by giving people the option to work where and when suits them best.

As businesses of all sizes struggle with hiring and retaining great talent, giving employees flexibility and consumer-grade tools that work creates a happier, more engaged workforce. In today’s tight employment market, that creates a competitive advantage for your business. Now, this type of mobile employee engagement is available out-of-the-box on the Skedulo platform.

Using Work Offers in Skedulo

Supporting scheduler decision-making and retaining human oversight over who is allocated to a job or shift is extremely important to our customers. That’s why Work Offers is designed to give schedulers the option to choose among a group of resources who have said they will take an offered job or shift. Retaining this level of scheduler control is also highly desirable when introducing a new way of assigning work into your operations.

We also worked to ensure that the mobile worker experience remains intuitive. We provide a clean and easy interface for them to see what the job is, its location, and when they need to be there. Your mobile workers get notifications that a job is available by SMS, push notification, or by checking the Skedulo mobile app. They can claim or decline with the push of a button. It’s that simple.

After the scheduler allocates the resource(s), the job or shift follows the same workflow as any other on the Skedulo platform. You can also track how many Work Offers are still outstanding against your mobile workers’ changing availability.

But our Work Offers capability doesn’t stop there. You can also use a “first come, first served” model (or, if you prefer, “first in, best dressed” in Australian) and auto-allocate a job to the first qualified person or people who say they want it until the number of needed resources is filled. That way, Work Offers can be used not only to give mobile employees more control over their schedules, but also to incentivize responsiveness and engagement with your business. This is especially valuable with part-time, contract, or casual workforces who often require additional effort to engage at the same level as in-house teams.

Example Use Cases

Businesses can use Work Offers to solve lots of different problems, ranging from tough scheduling choices to boosting employee morale. Here are just a few potential use cases:

• Assign a job or shift to a resource who has proactively said they want the work to increase employee satisfaction
• Allow qualified resources to make the allocation decision when the preferred resource is not available
• Confidently fill last-minute requests for just-in-time services
• Activate latent resources and increase their engagement with your business
• Better serve customers in locations with limited workforce availability by offering the job to those who are outside of the territory
• Reward the fastest-acting employees with assignments they want the most
• Gain insight into the desirability of an assignment to your current workforce
• Limit potential familiarity bias in scheduling decisions, particularly for popular assignments

Inspired by Our Customers

At Skedulo, we seek constant feedback from our diverse customer base to continually uncover, understand, and solve the challenges that come with mobile work and non-traditional, variable schedules. Inspired by our customers’ use cases and feedback, Work Offers is customer-driven innovation that attacks the challenge of mobile worker supply and demand against variable work opportunities.

“Our staff know their schedule best,” says Darcie Peacock, CEO of Solace Pediatric Home Healthcare in Colorado. “Giving our mobile clinicians options and control over how they spend their time is part of our strategy for recruiting and retaining the best pediatric clinicians in the state.” Solace manages its team of roughly 200 mobile caregivers using Skedulo. As its business grows rapidly–weekly home visits have increased by 50% YoY–Solace is constantly looking for ways to innovate its operations and better support its mobile clinicians.

“We like the ability to filter up or down based on region or tags to determine how wide of a net we should cast to our staff to meet the needs of a particular patient,” Peacock says.

Empower Employees with Work Offers in Skedulo

Scheduling is often complex and non-linear. Moreover, work requests rarely flow at a constant rate, so our customers are challenged to optimize the way their mobile employees are utilized. At Skedulo, we’re continually finding ways to improve your business by ensuring that no opportunity is left on the table. Work Offers provides a convenient way to assign opportunities to the right resources, whenever the time may be.

Skedulo customers who want to activate Work Offers can learn more about the feature details in this article in the Skedulo Support Portal.

To see Skedulo’s Mobile Workforce Management platform in action, request a demo today!