Humanforce alerts are able to automate notifying an employee when a published shift is updated on the roster.
Below are a list best practices to use when creating this alert.
Alert Name
It's important to use meaningful alert names to help identify the purpose of the alert. In this example, the alert is called "Published Roster Update - Employee."
Group and Function
The group and function identify what the alert is trying to send. As we are looking to send an alert to employees when their published shift is updated, select the Rostering group and the Published Roster Update Function.
Execute Every VS Execute At
The Execute Every and Execute At identify how often you want to send alerts out to users. With this alert, we recommend sending regularly so that employees are notified of changes ASAP. In this example, the alert will generate every couple minutes and is sent to each employee separately.
Allow Resend After
The allow Resend After controls how often we want to alert the user and is very important for this alert. We need to set it to 0 minute so that it can query the last edit time of the roster vs the last time the task ran.
Resend no more than
The Resend No More Than value provides a cap of how many times this alert will be sent before it is essentially deactivated. As a best practice, the Resend No More Than value should be left at 0 which means it will continue indefinitely each time the shift is updated.
Execute On
The Execute On setting allows the alert service to run on specific days of the week. In this example, the alert service will send every day that a change is made to a published shift.
Send By
The send by values allow you to notify the user either by Internal Message or Email. The internal message will notify the user when they next log in or send a push notification if they have the app installed while the email option sends to the email address on file. For Published Roster Update Alerts, we typically recommend sending by internal message so it pops up on employee's phones, however, you should use whatever method employees are more likely to see at your organisation.
Execution Offset VS Range Offset
The Execution Offset and the Range Offset allow the alert service to send alerts for shifts scheduled for the next X amount of days, weeks, months or years. In this example, we have set the Range Offset to look at all shifts schedule today and through the month. Any published shift that lands in this time period that is updated will send a notification to the employee.
Message template per person
You must use the Message Template Per Person section (on the left) to enter the content which will be sent to the employee. The HTML section will be sent via email while the plain text section is used for internal messages.
Plain Text Content
The plain text content is what will be sent to the employees when there are changes to a published shift. The title of the alert should always reference what is being sent while the body of the alert can utilise placeholders to personalise the alert.
Filtering VS Recipients
The Filtering section is used to reduce the employees which receive this alert. Employees can be filtered by the Location, Department, Role, Access level, Employee Type, and more. As we want to notify each employee separately, the Send alert to employee should be ticked.
The Recipients menu is generally used to notify a group of users such as managers and doesn't need to be used in this alert.
