9 Methods for Adding Staff To Rota

Over the past few years therota.com has striven to develop methods to aid the rota administrators in making rotas faster and simpler. This has resulted in the creation of different methods to suit different uses.

1. Day View

This is a direct way to add people to a rota and is particularly suitable for individual changes. See the Day View page for more information.

2. Day Fill

This is an alternative to Day View. It has the benefit of quicky putting multiple staff into a given shift, therefore usually used by rotas with large numbers of staff. See the Day Fill page for more information.

3. Week View

This page is a favourite of many rota administrators, as every person and unfilled post for a complete week is available for quick editing. See the Week View page for more information.

4. Slot View

This is similar to week view (the columns are arranged differently), and uses the same pop-up boxes for editing. Using Min By Shift is a prerequisite to make use of this page. See the Slot View page for more information.

5. Apply Patterns

Creating patterns for staff who work regular shifts will be a great time saver for administrators as well as the benefit of accurancy. The patterns area is divided into Personal Patterns (patterns for individual staff) and Rotation Patterns (where staff are first allocated to a team pattern.) You can either apply a whole week of shifts with a single click, or set the program to do it automatically. See the Shift Patterns page for further information.

6. Apply Weekly Templates

Weekly Templates are an alternative way of working instead of patterns. They are usually favoured where weeks look very similar to each other and you simply need to apply an image of a week into the future calendar. See the Weekly Templates page for further information.

7. Volunteering

With this method, the admin staff don't fill the rota themselves. It's a matter of opening the unfilled shifts to volunteers and then the volunteer viewing and taking shifts themselves (subject to security and qualifications. See the Unfilled and Volunteer page for further information.

8. Invite

This is part of the Unfilled area. Here the administrator can invite a person (or several) to take a shift. The program takes care of all the emails and updates. The recipient of the invite simply has to respond with a yes or no to the invite, by phone or SMS. See the Invite page for further information.

9. Event filling

The Events section of the program has its own methods of filling a rota, linked to the running of an event. See the Events page for further information.

Advisory

You can freely mix-and-match from all of the above methods, except that it is strongly advised that if you are using template you should not use patterns as well, (and vice versa) as these may contain contradictory information.