When I Work - Avis

Create's a standard line of communication between management and field personnel. Also helps the field personal to be prepared for their next task.

I work on the road a lot. The program is much easier to schedule personal from the desktop than it is from using the app on a device. Although it does not affect me all the time, it would be nice to see an interface on the device that was more similar to the one on the desk top. At least just for scheduling.

I love the ability to make changes right from the app on my phone. Also, to have the functionality to make adjustments as needed. The scheduler views and auto-assign feature has been a huge help to our organization. Also, the ability to put a begin and end date on availability requests. We tried 2 other scheduling systems and this one by far has been the most effective and easy to use for administrators and employees.

The cost is a little high and by paying on a yearly basis the discount isn't enough to really make a difference for paying in advance.

The ability for employees to clock in from their smart phone and the system logging their location is very useful. The chat feature also helps employers to communicate the days tasks quickly.l

The pricing structure seems to always be changing and every time I recommend it to a new or existing client, the current pricing is different than what my other clients are on. I need to be constantly checking the newest pricing before I recommended and begin setup for new accounts.

The Scheduling module works well for our 25-person veterinary practice where staff work rotating schedules. We can set up templates for each group and quickly deploy and tweak the schedule.

We tried to integrate with Gusto Payroll to streamline time-sheet reporting. It's a mess, and does not often work. It's really hard to troubleshoot because WhenIWork hides all the integration details. For instance you can not see the mapping of employees and their roles/jobs between the two companies. After a while I realize that it's faster to manually type in all the data since troubleshooting this is so time consuming. Plus you can not get support on the phone!

When I Work is a great product that our company loves to use. We love how easy it is to create a schedule and assign employees, and all of the features are very easy to work with and aesthetically pleasing. We also like the ability to keep a detailed database of employees in the system. Their customer service team has been very friendly and are always there to answer our questions in detail. It is also a great platform for time tracking and exporting time sheets every week to send to payroll. Overall, it's the best platform we could have found to help us do what we need to do every day.

A couple features we wish they had:

- The option to create a preferred list in our employee database (A-list, B-list, C-List, Do Not Call List, etc)
- The option to be able to look at all events at once on the Time Tracker for the day (right now you can only look at one event at a time, which is hard when we have multiple events and sometimes forget which ones are happening in a day)
- To have a log of attendance (who was late, who called out, who was a no show) that is linked to a person's profile so we know who the problem people are (maybe a color coding that's like "green" if they are good on attendance and then gets closer to "red" if they have had several call outs/tardies)
- A way to add the zip code of an event to a schedule/job site that shows up on timesheet exports
- A way to send a crew memo or mass notification ("this shift has been cancelled" or "this shift has had a time change, please confirm") to all or selected crew members via WIW.

When I Work has saved me daily headaches. Public Libraries don't have the funding to implement expensive employee scheduling software. When I Work even offers a free version which we started out with awhile ago but as our staff grew we moved into the paid format. Our library and employee pool has grown and changed, When I Work grows and changes alongside it. They continuously offer new resources and seek to keep ahead of us and just "know" what issues we may have as our staff is in flux.

The only issue I've seen thus far is a slight problem with the remote ap. Let me first say that having the ability to have an ap at all is great. My staff often is out of the library for programs and if they have an event prior to actual library hours they can clock in from their own phone. The issue that I speak of was mostly in calculating the distance that clocking in was allowed. It took a few tries to make sure that staff can check in, with a decent range, but not be so far from the library that it could be abused by someone wanting to beat the clock when they're late to work.

The ease of creating a schedule, distributing it, and letting staff handle their shift swaps or drops has completely empowered our team. The best feature is the 'history' button so that you know where it all began when shifts start with one employee and end with another. No longer do we have to hear, "I didn't know?" or "Who was originally scheduled?" because there's a ledger! Gone are the long, tedious hours of making sure the schedule is correct, every month, due to alternating work sites and schedules. Multi-site employees are never double-booked at different work sites, which is a game changer. Creating employee profiles take less than 60 seconds. Best of all, teaching everyone was not painful as there's a whole video on the website that walks everyone through the basics in less than 15 minutes.

The print feature is limited to what is offered with no option to change the font, unable to expand the daily roster (daily view is limited to 7 names on paper calendar), and there's no option to print in 2 week segments. This isn't a deal breaker, but the old school needs still exist of having a paper trail (even in PDF form) and due to limited names viewed on any given day, we can't use the feature to it's fullest. If the box for the day could expand to reflect all the names when printing, we'd pay extra!

It is EXTREMELY easy for the end-user to utilize this software. There are also some pretty good mobile applications that it offers which makes tracking your schedule very easy!

There are a lot of overly-helpful tips and suggestions that constantly spam the administrators' email accounts and scheduling interfaces. (Essentially the company does this to assist the administrators, but there is no way to stop it, which makes it very annoying after awhile). The mobile application can also be buggy at times, and the website schedule does not work properly on mobile phones that don't have a "desktop view", as the website does not have a mobile version designed for it. This forces you to use the mobile app on mobile devices unless your mobile phone can display it in a "desktop view". On a normal computer interface, this works just fine.

It has many of the features we needed for scheduling employees.
We liked that more than one location can be scheduled for different employees, even sometimes on the same day. When we finally figured out how to use it, the map function was convenient because we go different places nearly every day. We liked that employees could see who was working with them each day.

There is no ability for employees to decline a shift. For several years, we requested the company add this feature. This turned out to be a deal breaker for us, and we finally went to another software.
I also thought it was odd that when a loyal customer of many years left, no one from the company contacted us to find out why.
Interestingly, the software we changed to also costs less per month, in spite of the fees they charge us for employees to accept/decline shifts by text message.

We love the fact that our employees can access it on their phones. Our employees are college students, so being able to use it on a mobile device is crucial. Our old program didn't have that functionality. I also like that I can go in and move someone's shift to "open" for any other employee to accept. Since our employees are college students and anything required for a course is excused from work, so it is really nice to be able to go in and move a shift for an employee that has an exam or something like that. I also like that employees have to acknowledge their shifts.

Two things - I can't go in and schedule just one person. We are on a college campus that operate on quarters. I would like to be able to look at an individual schedule for a certain time period and edit it as necessary, but that functionality doesn't exist. My employees are frustrated with the notifications. It is great that someone can do a "drop shift request" that goes out to all of the other employees, but it is frustrating to get 10 emails about that. We (mainly our hourly employees) wish there was an option to get the notifications in a digest once a day instead an email for every single notification.