3. Building the Schedule

Once you have created your Popular Shifts on the left-hand side, you can start assigning them to your employees.   You can choose the Schedule you wish to work on from the dropdown menu on the right-hand side. 

All the employees for that department will be listed to the left of the schedule.

You can also notice immediately if anyone has Time Off logged.  It will appear automatically on the Schedule so you don’t accidentally roster an employee for a day they are unavailable.

In order to start building your Schedule, you can go to the Popular Shifts, click on the shift,  drag it,  and drop it in for an employee to work the shift on a given day.

You can continue this action, and return to the Popular Shifts to drag and drop them as needed into the schedule.

However, if you want to use the same shift multiple times, it is quicker to copy the shift.  To do this, hold the “shift” key on your keyboard, and click on a shift.  You can then drag and drop a copy of that shift into the schedule.

If an employee doesn’t have the position assigned to them on a schedule, you can click into the shift itself to edit it.  

You can also change the start time or the end time or unpaid break on a particular shift as well.    You can also put in a Shift Note. That note will only be seen by the employee working that shift when they receive their schedule information by email or through the MyZimply app. 

Make sure to save any changes before closing.

You may notice when building your schedule that a Bell Icon appears below an employee’s name.  This bell indicates you need to check the compliance tab underneath the Schedule.   If you click this tab, you will see there is a minimum hour deviation for Jeremy, which is based on rules in his Payroll tab on his employee profile. 

To the right-hand side of the Schedule we can see that we have the total amount of employee hours for each employee.  These will increase as we add in some hours for Jeremy to make sure he meets his minimum requirements. 

The Bell Icon disappears once the requirements are met. 

To the right of the Schedule you can also choose to view by total employee costs if you have permission to see this.  You can see how much each employee costs per week based on their hourly pay rate and hours assigned to them. 

You can also click into the Labour Costs tab to see the total cost for each day, as well as the total costs for each schedule in your location

The Labour Hours Tab at the bottom of the Schedule shows a breakdown of hours per schedule versus forecasted hours if you have them.  

You can also click into a graph view to see how your labour hours break down by position for each day of the week. This view can help you determine if you can or should change the amount of hours you have scheduled. 

The Labour Hours tab further shows the breakdown of hours scheduled by position and time of day, for each day of the week. 

You can also click to see the breakdown of headcount for the entire week. 

Returning to the Schedule itself, you can click into each day and view a breakdown of the weather.  And as your staff start working, you can check here to see if they have clocked in for their scheduled shifts as the day progresses. 

There’s also space here to write and save a note to send to all employees with a shift that day.

Schedule notes can also be added to the Notes tab underneath the schedule.  A note here will be sent to everyone who receives the schedule when it’s published.  

The private note section is also available if you need to communicate with anyone else who will be working on the same schedule, like another manager.  

Once saved, this note can only be viewed on the web application.

You can navigate to other dates on your schedule using the arrows at the top left or the yellow calendar date picker.

If you have similar schedules each week, you may find it useful to copy schedules. You need to start with the blank schedule week, click ‘Actions’ and in the dropdown select “Copy Schedule”.

You select the week you wish to overwrite into the blank schedule from the date picker.  Be sure you are always starting with a blank schedule first before you confirm your choice. 

At this point you can edit the schedule again by dragging and dropping shifts if you want to make any changes for the week. 

At any point if you wish, you can get rid of this schedule.  Click on ‘Actions;, and in the dropdown select “Clear Schedule”.  This will remove all the shifts.  Again you must be sure you want to take this action as there is no easy way to undo it.

Lastly, if you have a particular large schedule with lots of employees, it’s useful to know you can shrink the size of it to view more information at once using these arrows.