We often times see customers bring their DM's into the scheduling process more and more. We have the data that you need and automation to hopefully help you be strategic quicker than ever before.
We'd recommend following these steps to maximize your scheduling efficiency, and keep your managers involved!
Use our schedule approval process. This feature was released in October 2021 just for you. This allows you to have your team build the schedule and then you can review, approve, and lock it. This helps to prevent schedule changes after you review.
Here you'd have your team build their schedules by a certain day of the week. So maybe you enforce that you only want them adjusting 3 or less shifts from what Shiftlab automated, and you want no unavailability to interrupt our busiest days.
Once they are done building the schedule, you can come in on your scheduling day, review/provide feedback and then approve.
Once the schedule is toggled to approve, only District leaders and above can make changes.
^ This one is popular especially in Q4. Go build your November schedules in advance, and then lock them down!
If you're not using our approval process, we recommend involving your managers with preferences at least so that you can have them pre-loaded onto your Shiftlab schedule before you're ready to build it.
You might not know this, but Store Managers with View Only privilege's still can place preferences onto their schedules for you. This will reduce in the outside emails and texts and keep your whole team interacting in Shiftlab.
So, give your managers a consistent deadline for Unavailability and PTO submissions. Lets say that you build schedules each Wednesday, I would make the cutoff for managers to have their submissions in Shiftlab by Monday of that week.
Then, when you come in on Wednesday's you can see, review, and approve/deny any availability requests and then just click "Auto-Build". This gives your manager and their team some control in telling us when people can't work, then lets you and Shiftlab create the best possible schedule with the remaining time!