Configuring Shift Consent Templates

This article describes how to configure the templates used to drive consent messages when a shift is offered or made available to bid on. It's available in Humanforce Cloud via Admin > Awards > Shift Consent Templates

Including shift consent ensures employees explicitly agree to shift changes and additional shifts, where the conditions associated with the shift - such as the hours, location, pay rate and availability - may differ from their typical work arrangements.

What are Shift Consent Templates?

They are a mechanism for presenting a message to employees in the Work App at the point where an employee receives a shift offer or makes a shift bid. 

Each template allows your Roster Managers to ensure that the appropriate shift consent flow is presented to an employee when they are offered a shift. The template used during the consent flow will depend on the type of shift on offer, and the employee's award profile.

If your organization has a requirement to record an employee's consent for certain types of shifts - or when there's changes to an agreed shift - this feature gives you the flexibility to add a consent message which an employee can accept, or decline, as part of the shift acceptance flow.

Because templates will vary based on your organization's shift types and industry needs, Humanforce does not supply pre-built templates; your admin will need to add some before any consent messages will be visible to employees.

Enabling Access

There are 2 levels of permission for managing Shift Consent Templates: View and Add/Edit 

1. In Humanforce Cloud, go to Admin > Security Config > Access Levels
2. For the relevant Access Level that you want to change, click Edit
3. Click on the Permissions tab
4. Search for Shift Consent
5. Find the permissions under Maintenance Screens
   • For access to the viewing the template list, select "Shift Consent Templates". This permission will allow viewing the high-level details of each template, but not allow editing or creation.
   • For edit access to allow creating or editing templates, select "Allow editing".
6. After making your selection, click Apply Changes

Creating a Shift Consent template

Before creating a lot of templates, we recommend you create some internal documentation to plan out the scenarios where different consent messages should be shown. You will want to consider the Shift Types, and the Award Profiles, that should invoke a consent message.

This is important, because a shift may match with only 1 (or zero) consent templates, so our template editing process will not allow you to make a template that has the same combination of Shift Types + Award profiles used already. 

1. In Humanforce web, navigate to Admin > Award Config > Shift Consent Templates
2. Select "Add new template" from the upper right corner. A dialog will open.
3. Provide a name and Export code to help identify the template. (Export Code may be used in future if your data is exported)
4. Select the Shift Types which this template could apply to. You must select at least one.
5. You can then select one or more Award Profiles.
   If you don't see any options, this means all Award Profiles have already been linked with the selected Shift Types (in other templates).
   
6. In the "Template Content" area, enter the consent message that your employees will see. You may want to start with a heading like Shift Agreement or Shift Consent.
   
7. Save the template to finish.

Why can't I see all of the available Award Profiles?

This is most likely because, for the Shift Types you have selected, those Award Profiles have already been linked in a different template. Humanforce won't let you create a template that has similar conditions, as this would make it unclear which consent message is to be invoked under those conditions.

Example Usage when Rostering

A simple example when creating an ad-hoc shift (at short notice) with a specific employee or role in mind:

1. When adding a new shift, the shift type defaults to an ordinary shift type (where no penalty rates are included).
2. The manager publishes the shift and sends the offer to an employee.
3. Based on the shift type and the employee award profile, a standard consent message is displayed. If the employee accepts, then the shift is paid at the ordinary rate.
4. If however, the employee declines (perhaps because it is too short notice), then the manager could locate the declined shift by filtering the roster for declined shifts.
5. The declined shift can be updated to a different type (that corresponds with an overtime or penalty) and re-offered to the employee.
6. Based on the changed shift type, a different consent message would be displayed (based on the consent template).
7. If the employee accepts the new conditions/message, then the penalty rates would be applied. 
   Note that award configuration may be required for the penalty to be applied.

I added some templates. What next?

Now you have a few templates, you could check that the consent message displays correctly on a mobile phone, by completing the steps outlined in this article: see How Shift Consent Applies in the Work App

Note: Shift Consent messages are only visible to employees in the Work App.

Deleting a template

You can delete a template if it is no longer required. You might want to do this if the template covered a lot of shift types or awards, but going forward you have a need to define more specific templates (so you're replacing the old one with 2 or more new ones, for example).

New shifts will not be able to match with a deleted template (for generating the Shift Consent message). However, past shifts that were linked with the templated content/message will still retain a record of the consent message.