At Nowsta, events are our bread and butter. Our scheduling tools are built to help you manage the constant week-to-week variation in shifts, roles, and venue locations that all event-based businesses are familiar with.
But just because you’re in the events industry doesn’t mean that every single shift you schedule is tied to an event. Caterers, for instance, often have staff in their kitchens, warehouses, and cafes who work roughly the same hours each week regardless of how many events are on the schedule. We want to help our customers manage those staff from the Nowsta platform as easily as they do their event staff. That’s why today, we’re excited to announce our newest scheduling tool: Weekly View.
Weekly View lets you:
- See all shifts scheduled for your entire staff list or for a group of staff over a one-week period
- Assign new shifts and see how they affect labor costs and employee hours totals for the upcoming week
- Differentiate quickly between event and non-event shifts, even if you have staff working some of each in the same week
By displaying all shifts regardless of whether or not they’re tied to an event, Weekly View gives you the most comprehensive possible control over your labor needs and strategy. Below, we’re going to tell you more about how it works and why we’re excited about it.
What you’ll see on Weekly View
Nowsta has historically offered two staff scheduling tools optimized for events: the Event Calendar and Multi-Event View. The Event Calendar puts all your upcoming events on a calendar, then lets you view and assign shifts for each by clicking on individual events. Multi-Event View lets you pull up three to four events at once and assign shifts for all of them.
Weekly View breaks the mold by showing you a week’s worth of shifts grouped by employee rather than by event.
Instead of a calendar, Weekly View puts all your upcoming shifts onto a grid, with each row representing a different employee and each column representing a different day. By default, we’ll show your entire staff list, but you can filter to show only staff with shifts already assigned or staff from a specific department. Likewise, you can also opt to show all shifts, event shifts only, or non-event shifts only.
Our color-coding system also makes it easy to tell the confirmation status of each shift:
- Green shifts are confirmed
- Grey shifts are assigned to a worker but haven’t yet been offered to them
- Yellow shifts have been offered to an employee and are awaiting their confirmation
- Red shifts are declined
- Blue shifts have been bulk published and are eligible to be picked up by the staff member in question on a first-come, first-served basis
The top of the screen shows you the percentage of each day’s shifts that are filled and unfilled. At the bottom of the screen, you can see the total confirmed hours and projected wages for the entire week’s shifts, plus the day-by-day breakdowns. You’ll also see each individual worker’s confirmed and pending hours next to their name and profile picture.
How to use Weekly View
The first time you open Weekly View, you’ll see the upcoming event shifts you’ve already scheduled. You should still add and assign those shifts on an event-by-event basis from the Event Calendar or Multi-Event View. But you’ll now be able to add your first non-event shifts from Weekly View by clicking a cell in the column of the appropriate day and row of the appropriate worker.
Nowsta will automatically warn you of shift conflicts or staff approaching the overtime threshold, just as we do when you schedule from the Event Calendar or Multi-Event View. But with Weekly View, we’re also including non-event shifts in those calculations to give you the full view of your labor picture.
Once you’ve created them, you can then request, assign, or confirm multiple shifts at once using Weekly View’s bulk actions tool. Start by clicking the button in the upper right hand corner.
You can choose which shifts’ statuses you want to edit based on the shifts’ dates, department, or whether they’re event versus non-event.
A more complete scheduling tool
We want Nowsta to be the go-to tool for our customers to manage all of their employees. Weekly View serves that goal by letting us move beyond just part-time event staff and help our clients schedule their full-time hourly staff as well.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch and learn more about what Weekly View can do for you! If you’re a current customer, send us an email or start chatting with our support team. If not, you can always schedule a demo with our sales team to see Nowsta in action.
