Here’s a recent post on a customer’s Schedulefly Message Wall, which all of the customer’s employees see when they log in : “It has been noticed lately that many employees are making a habit of clocking in before their scheduled time. Please clock in no more than 5 minutes before your scheduled shift unless approved by a manager.”

I mention this because some people would like Schedulefly to systematically control clock-ins. They have a difficult time keeping their staff from clocking in early, so they use systems to eliminate the issue. And that works for some folks – especially in environments where the communication gap is large and difficult to manage. Without Schedulefly, getting this kind of critical message out to staff often and effectively is a problem.

I tend to prefer the simple process – just tell your employees not to clock in early, as our customer did here by broadcasting the message to their wall and staff’s inboxes and cell phones. But then again our system makes critical communication like this a breeze. Getting an important message out like this in front of staff is simple. In the end – this allows to management to easily enforce the message (via web, text, email) while not adding complexity to their system and the risk of management distractions when staff do indeed have a real reason to clock in early and can’t…

On this topic – we could add business logic to Schedulefly (more software rules and restrictions) to control many events like this – but we do not and it’s because we feel that leaving some enforcements up to humans makes our system easier to use, more flexible and much more reliable. We would rather lean towards a very usable, reliable system that does not get in the way of the restaurant’s ability to run smoothly. Schedulefly will always require a tad bit of human logic to be applied – by design.

Keepin’ It Simple & Fun,

Wes @ Schedulefly