Offering and Assigning Shifts via Bid Manager

On this page, you'll find detailed information about reviewing, offering and assigning shifts directly to employees via the Bid Manager screen. For general information on Bid Manager, click HERE.

• Offering vs Assigning
• Enabling Offer & Assign
  • Offer & Assign - System Setting
  • Offer - Permission
  • Assign - Permission
• How to review, offer and assign shifts
  • What happens after a shift is offered via Bid Manager?
  • What happens after a shift is assigned via Bid Manager?
• What happens to duplicate bids?
• Employee Notification

Offering vs Assigning

Offer: Bid Manager functionality allows users to review bids submitted by employees from the Shift Bidding pages in Web or Mobile app, and choose which to offer out. Those offers are sent to the employees who must accept (confirm) or decline those offers. When accepted, the shift is confirmed against that employee. Where declined, the manager would access Bid Manager to select another bid to offer the shift to.

Assign: In v6.0.17 (Jan 2024), the concept of 'Assign' was added to Bid Manager. This new functionality allows a user to directly assign - rather than offer - a shift to an employee who bid for it. The employee will not need to accept the shift for it to be assigned/confirmed.

This 'Assign' function effectively bypasses the entire Offer process, meaning managers can more quickly fill vacant shifts with employees who have expressed a desire to work that shift.

Enabling

Offer & Assign - System Setting

A system-wide system setting controls if Bid Manager provides access to both Offer and Assign, or if 'Assign' is the only option provided in Bid Manager.

The default setting is Offer and Assign for all HF customers.

As this is a system setting, this selected setting will apply to all users, however user permissions will determine if a user actually has access to Assign on screen.

If you are a user with access to Admin settings, follow the steps below to select the appropriate behaviour of Bid Manager.

1. Go to Admin > Admin Config > System Settings
2. Click the Rosters/Roster Templates tab
3. Scroll down to the Bid Manager/Shift Bidding section, and select the appropriate radio button
   • Select Offer and Assign for all users to have access to both Offer and Assign in Bid Manager.
     • Users must have the Allow Assign permission active to be able to see both Offer and Assign. If inactive, they will only see Offer in Bid Manager.
   • Select Assign only for all users to only have access to Assign in Bid Manager.
     • If selected, all Bid Manager users must also have the Allow Assign permission active, otherwise no options will be available in Bid Manager.
4. Click Save. The change will be effective immediately.

Offer - Permission

The ability to Offer is granted by default where a user has the TimeTarget Online>View Bid Manager Page permission, which is also required to simply access the Bid Manager page. For more information on permissions refer to the Access Level section in the Using Shift Bidding/Bid Manager (Manager) page.

Assign - Permission

For managers to be able to use the Assign functionality in Bid Manager:

1. Go to Admin > Security Config > Access Levels
2. For the relevant Access Level, click Edit
3. Open the Permissions tab
4. Enter View Bid in the filter search box and press enter
5. Expand the View Bid Manager Page parent permission and tick Allow Assign
6. Click Apply Changes.

The above assumes the user also has the 'TimeTarget Online>View Bid Manager Page' permission.

Where the Allow Assign permission is inactive, users will still have access to Offer in Bid Manager, assuming the System Setting (below) is set to Offer and Assign.

This default setting of the 'Allow Assign' permission is inactive.

The below table illustrates the combinations of system setting and permissions related to Bid Manager Offer and Assign and what will be available to the user for each.

How to review, offer and assign shifts

Your Home page will show a Shift Bids Pending card containing the number of shift bids that are currently unanswered. Clicking this card will take you to Bid Manager.

To directly assign via Bid Manager, or to offer shifts to employees who have submitted a bid:

• Go to Management > Shift > Bid Manager.
  
• Apply filters to search for the shifts you want to review, including:
  • Date range
  • Location, Department or Role
  • Area
  • Event
  • Shifts to display - show all, exclude shifts without any bids, or only show shifts with bids available for offer/assign.
• Once you've set your filters, click Search.

• When your results return, a tag indicates the dates that have shifts and bids that require your attention.

• Expand each date using the [ + ] to display the details of the unassigned shift(s) on that date.

  Important: Shifts that only have declined bids against them are only visible when 
  selecting the 'Show shifts with no bids' checkbox. 
  

• When you expand the date row, another Bids available for offer tag will indicate the exact shift/s employees have submitted bids for but none have yet been assigned or offered, as on 30th Nov and 1st Dec below.

  The tag will not appear on shifts that have already been offered, such as on the 29th November 10.30am shift in the below screenshot.

• Expand each shift using the arrow to display the details of each bid for that shift including any overlapping shifts already assigned to the employee. Note that you can Customise columns displayed on Bid Manager to see the details that are most meaningful to you.
  
  
  • The Type column shows:
    • Bid to indicate the bid does not overlap any existing confirmed shift
    • Exchange to indicate the bid for a shift overlaps with the employee's existing confirmed shift
  • The Status column indicates whether the shift bid is in a Submitted, Offered or Declined status.
    
    

• All bids (in any status) will remain visible until an offer is accepted by the employee, or where the shift has been directly assigned.

• Declined bid offers will always appear at the top of the listing, sorted by the date/time the decline was received.

• Bids in a Submitted or Offered status are sorted by the date/time the bid was originally submitted.

• To prevent managers from offering or assigning exchange shifts where an employee - who does not have the 'Allow Exchanging' permission - has bid for a standard shift, but before it can be offered or directly assigned, another shift has been assigned to that employee, such bids will not be visible in Bid Manager. See below scenario:
  1. The Allow exchanging permission is FALSE for the bidding employee.
  2. Employee bids on shift A (standard shift)
  3. Employee is then rostered shift B that overlaps shift A, meaning the bid is now effectively now an exchange bid. Shift B may or may not be published.
  4. In Shift Bidding the employee can still see shift A, as for them, it is still a bid for a shift and the rostered shift may yet be deleted or moved, and if so, the bid would still be valid.
  5. In Bid Manager, the manager cannot view the bid for shift A anymore as it's now an exchange shift bid and as the employee does not have the permission to submit exchange bids it should not be possible for it to be assigned or offered to the employee.

     
      
     

• Depending on your permissions and system settings, up to two options may be presented.
  • To offer a shift to an employees, tick the relevant 'Offer' checkbox and click Submit. 
  • To directly assign a shift to an employee, tick the 'Assign' checkbox and click Submit.
    
    

Both Offer and Assign functions via Bid Manager follow the same rules:

• Offer and Assign checkboxes will be disabled:
  • where the status is Offered
  • on bids where that shift overlaps with another shift that is already selected
• Bid Manager will not allow you to select overlapping shifts for the same employee.
• Bid Manager will not allow you to select more than one checkbox for the same shift
• Locked unassigned shifts can still be can be bid on, offered and assigned.
• You can submit multiple 'offers' and 'assigns' in a single submission.
• If any of the bids selected are no longer valid (eg where the employee has withdrawn the bid during the time Bid Manager was open), you will be notified at the time of submission, asked to refresh the page to obtain only valid bids to allow you to reselect then resubmit.
• The shift will no longer be visible in Bid Manager where:
  • the shift is offered to an employee
  • the shift is directly assigned to an employee
• The shift will again be visible in Bid Manager where an employee has declined an offer (depending on 'display' filter selected)
• If neither Offer nor Assign checkboxes are visible, the permission/system setting combination selected is incorrect. Refer to the Enabling section above.
• The shift will be locked as soon as it's assigned, or offered and accepted.

What happens after a shift is offered via Bid Manager?

Where an offer is submitted, the bid status will update to 'Offered' in Bid Manager

When offering a shift via Bid Manager that shift is immediately assigned to the employee and the employee must then accept the offer before it becomes a confirmed shift.

Once accepted, the new shift will replace any original overlapping shift and the new shift will be read only in the Rostering screens.

If the employee declines the offer, what happens next depends on your account settings.

Where 'Auto-unassign' is inactive:

• if the employee declines the offer, the declined shift will remain allocated to the employee and must be manually unassigned by the manager via the Roster.
• In an exchange shift scenario, upon declining an offer, the employee's original shift will remain assigned to the employee.

Where 'Auto-unassign' is active:

• if the employee declines the offer, the declined shift will be automatically unassigned from the employee.
• In an exchange shift scenario, upon declining an offer, the employee's original shift will remain assigned to the employee.

What happens after a shift is assigned via Bid Manager?

Where a shift is assigned, it will be removed entirely from Bid Manager as it is no longer an unassigned shift.

The shift will be immediately assigned and confirmed to the employee, and will be locked in the Rostering screens.

Any existing overlapping shifts will be unassigned, as occurs when the shift is offered and accepted.

What happens to duplicate bids?

An employee may submit multiple bids against shifts that are all the same - duplicates. This occurs automatically when bidding via the mobile app - a single bid will be applied to all shifts that are exact duplicates, but can also be actioned via Humanforce Web by the employee simply selecting all the bids manually.

From v6.0.21 (Mar 2024) if an employee has active bids against duplicate shifts and they are either assigned or offered one of those shifts via Bid Manager, all the bids from that employee against the other duplicate shifts will be removed from Shift Bidding and from Bid Manager, so the manager does not have additional bids to manage that are no longer effectively valid. 

If the employee declines the shift offer, their bids on the other duplicate shifts will not be reinstated.

Note: For the above to occur, the shifts must be exactly the same, right down to the comments.

Employee Notifications

For information on what notifications are generated in support of Shift Bidding/Bid Manager, refer to Using Shift Bidding/Bid Manager (Manager)