6 Time-saving Labor Tips Using TimeForge

Are you or your managers burnt out? Feeling like you work three jobs at once? Exhausted from covering shifts due to a labor shortage? TimeForge, a Red Oval Partner who offers labor management solutions that streamline independent grocers' HR and operations with a full suite of powerful yet easy-to-use tools accessible from a single dashboard, understands the struggle and is sharing their automation tips to help.

Since the most time-consuming tasks related to managing employees are often tedious and repetitive, automation is the best way to ensure you have more time to spend supporting your team and keeping customers happy.

Tip 1: Allow department managers to create schedules in TimeForge

“One of the biggest time-saving tips in my book is allowing department managers, such as the deli manager or bakery manager, to create schedules in TimeForge,” said TimeForge Implementations Specialist Mike Hetisimer.

“Sometimes, a business will require its department managers to write down their schedule, then give that schedule to a store manager to key into TimeForge," Hetisimer continued. "But TimeForge was designed to allow collaboration and review of schedules before they’re posted. With our robust permissions, businesses can grant their department managers access to create schedules in TimeForge, then store managers can simply review and post them!”

Tip 2: Enable automatic clock-outs

TimeForge Support Team Lead Diego Gaytan recommends enabling automatic clock-outs.

“Setting up an auto clock-out time for entries where an employee does not record an out-punch can save managers a significant amount of time,” he said. “Auto clock-outs are easy to find on the Manage Attendance page with the page’s filter. If you select Clocked Out by Schedule, you can easily find entries you’d need to update to reflect the actual time the employee should have clocked out.”

This screenshot shows how to check for automatic clock-outs in Manage Attendance using the filtering options.

“Also, by setting up auto clock-outs, managers won’t have to clock out employees from a timeclock or on the website,” added Gaytan. “This can cut down on the time a manager has to spend at the timeclock or digging through attendance entries in order to clock someone out.”

Tip 3: Delegate certification tracking to TimeForge

“My advice is to treat TimeForge as a trusted virtual employee that can offload the more mundane and time-consuming aspects of management,” TimeForge Co-founder Erik van Gilder said. “A great example of this is certifications. TimeForge can track certifications for you and automatically send reminders to managers and employees prior to a certification’s expiration.”

If a certification does expire, TimeForge can warn a manager during scheduling. TimeForge can also prevent an employee from clocking into their shift. (This is known as certification enforcement.)

These features ensure that a business always remains in compliance, and they save managers a great deal of time. TimeForge automatically handles all the emails, tracking, reminders, and calendar dates.

Tip 4: Automate repetitive tasks, such as shift reminders

Instead of constantly reaching out to employees to ensure they can make their shifts, managers can offload that work to TimeForge. This can save a significant portion of time that would otherwise be spent writing emails, text messages, or playing phone tag.

To see what kind of personal alerts are possible from the employee profile, click here.

In TimeForge, alerts are set from the employee profile page. Just click your name in the upper right corner of the application, then select the Alerts tab.

To set up shift confirmations, make sure “Confirm Scheduled Shifts” is set to “Yes” under the location settings. You can also choose whether to prompt employees on the day of or multiple times. You can also choose to be notified about things like short staffing on this page.

Tip 5: Automate labor law compliance

Similar to the time-saving tips above, TimeForge can automate the complex rules of labor law compliance.

It even does so proactively, meaning it will prevent non-compliant schedules and automatically pay out predictability pay as required by law.

This not only saves managers time but protects the business from costly fines. You can also enable things like bid shifts and shift swaps, which are great for compliance as well as saving time.

Tip 6: Take advantage of our free annual account wellness check

Senior Software Engineer, Daniel Fernandez recommends a yearly account wellness check. These checkups are a great opportunity to make sure your account is following best practices, as well as getting the most out of the features available to you.

“Our labor management experts will review your account and offer suggestions on what you can do to save more time and automate your tasks,” he says. “There is no extra charge; this checkup is completely free to customers.”