What's new ✨

• Mark all shifts empty - remove employees for all assigned shifts
• Remove empty shifts - delete all un-assigned shifts
• Mark empty shifts as open - update all un-assigned shifts as Open Shifts
• Delete all shifts

It also supports the upcoming Shift Plans feature suite which will improve the business produtivity by assigning a single employee with multiple shifts in a single day (aka: Micro-scheduling).  If you feel interested to join an early Alpah for Shift Plans, please register here.

How to use it 🤓

Click here to read more 

Got feedback to share? Go to Deputy > Help > Give us feedback

Rollout 

The improvements will roll out to all accounts over the coming weeks.

What's new ✨

We’re excited to announce updates that make managing and picking up Open Shifts with Approval and Find Replacement shifts smoother than ever! 

The following improvements will be available in your account soon: 

• Team members can decline Open Shifts with Approval or Find Replacement invites. This will help narrow down your pool of potential team members for unfilled shifts, saving you time and effort.
• Managers can decline Open Shifts with Approval requests from team members. This will help enhance communication and ensure team members won't be left in the dark if they haven’t been selected for a shift.
• General improvements to viewing and editing Open Shifts features. You can now view Shift Details and make certain edits to shifts, such as adding Shift Notes, even if there are already requests.

How to use it 🤓

Click here to read more about Open Shifts with Approval. 

Click here to read more about Find Replacement.

Got feedback to share? Go to Deputy > Help > Give us feedback

Rollout 

These feature improvements will roll out to all accounts over the coming weeks.

What's new ✨

We’ve added a helpful alert for scheduling managers! Now, if you try to schedule a team member who hasn’t finished their onboarding process, you’ll receive a warning. Don’t worry, you can still choose to ‘schedule anyway’ if needed.

Why 🤔

Making sure everyone is fully onboarded before they start working is essential for a smooth operation. In the past, managers might have accidentally scheduled new hires who weren’t fully prepared, leading to disruptions and compliance issues. With this new feature, you can avoid those pitfalls and ensure your team is always ready and compliant from day one.

How to use it 🤓

Click here to read more about how to use it.

Available for Deputy HR subscribers only.

Got feedback to share? Go to Deputy > Help > Give us feedback

How to get it 🧪

This feature will roll out to all accounts over the coming weeks.

Deputy HR is thrilled to introduce Shift Pulse+, an enhanced version of our popular Shift Pulse feature, designed to elevate your workplace engagement. With powerful new customization options, Shift Pulse+ empowers you to tailor the experience to perfectly match the unique needs of your business.

What’s new ✨

Shift Pulse+ puts you in control of your team's engagement with these exciting new customization features:

• Craft your own questions: Tailor Shift Pulse questions to gather the specific insights that matter most to your business.
• Choose the frequency: Decide how often you want to check in with your team to ensure you're getting timely feedback.
• Customize responses: Create response options and emojis that resonate with your team's unique communication style.
• Target specific roles: Determine which roles within your organization should participate in Shift Pulse surveys.
• Focus on specific locations: Narrow down the locations or areas from which you want to gather feedback.

Shift Pulse+ empowers you to create a personalized and effective feedback system that truly works for your business.

But that's not all! We've also revamped the Shift Pulse report in your Deputy mobile app. Now you have even more Shift Pulse insights at your fingertips, allowing you to effortlessly monitor your team's engagement wherever you are.

Why 🤔

This update was driven by your valuable feedback, giving managers the increased control and customization they requested. But that's not all! Shift Pulse+ marks the beginning of Deputy's expansion into offering even more employee engagement solutions in the future. Stay tuned!

What if I don’t have a Deputy HR subscription?

Shift Pulse is available for all Deputy users, but a Deputy HR subscription unlocks its full potential and enhances your experience.

Without a Deputy HR subscription, you'll still be able to:

• Use the default Shift Pulse question to gauge your team's feelings.
• View a snapshot of your team's recent sentiment with the last 7 days of data.
• See a limited selection of comments for an overview of feedback.

A Deputy HR subscription will give you access to:

• Customization: Craft your own questions, set check-in frequency, and tailor responses.
• Deeper Insights: View all historical data and read every comment for a complete picture.
• Mobile Convenience: View detailed reports and all comments directly in the Deputy mobile app.

While Shift Pulse offers value to all Deputy users, the enhanced features and customization options available with a Deputy HR subscription truly elevate your team's engagement and your ability to act on feedback.

Refer to the table below for the full comparison:

How to use it 🤓

To view the extra Shift Pulse configurations, navigate to Business Settings > Timesheets > Customise. You can then view the Shift Pulse report by navigating to the Reports tab and click View full report in Shift Pulse.

If you want to use the new Shift Pulse configurations, please note that your team have to be on the latest Android and iOS versions of the Deputy mobile apps.

If you are subscribed to HR, you can also get an overview of the report by navigating to the People tab and clicking Team engagement on the left hand side navigation.

Learn more on how to use Shift Pulse+ here.

Rollout

Shift Pulse+ will be available to all Premium, Flexi, Timesheet and Scheduling plan customers by the end of this week.

What's new ✨

A new business setting that allows you to define a custom term to replace the word “shift” in the Deputy product (similar to setting a custom term for team member & breaks).

Why 🤔

Using the right terminology for work in your business means you can accurately reflect the work to be performed and can also help you meet local labour laws.

How to use it 🤓

Check out how to set a custom term for "shift".

Got feedback to share? Go to the floating ? button > Give us feedback

What

We have built a new option in the leave policy builder that allows businesses to set policies that don’t accrue leave to also not deduct.

Why

Today, when team members make requests against a leave policy today there is always a deduction from the leave balance. This means that many balances go into negative values and are displayed more prominently to team members and managers. For many businesses they want to use certain leave policies to track requests but not necessarily deduct from a balance. This is common for sickness and other personal leave policies.

How

This option is now available to all accounts which have the new leave management engine enabled on their accounts and can be configured to be ON by any System Admins. It can be found in a new policy or an existing policy by navigating to the Does Not Accrue option within a leave policy. Please note that this change does not stop businesses from editing employee balances manually; balances can still be edited manually from the team members profile.

• Now available to every business using the new leave engine experience on Deputy!
• Relevant help docs have been updated and can be found here.

We know that staying compliant with Fair Workweek law is no simple feat - it’s fundamentally changing the way that large retail and hospitality businesses schedule and pay their employees. Today, falling short of Fair Workweek law can mean millions of dollars in potential fines and lawsuits. As your partner in compliance, Deputy’s new features simplify these complex requirements and make it easy to create compliant, cost-effective schedules and manage last-minute adjustments seamlessly.

With Deputy’s new Fair Workweek features, you can now:

• Create cost-effective schedules with just a few clicks that help you stay compliant
• Create and manage team member’s Good Faith Estimates, which are now accessible in the Deputy mobile app
• Provide your staff with advance notice of schedules
• Request and record consent for schedule changes and clopenings
• Track schedule change history and predictability pay records with new FWW reports

How do I use these new features?

Deputy Premium customers now have self-service access to the new Fair Workweek features by navigating to Location Settings > Scheduling > Consent and selecting their local jurisdiction, and then applying FWW pay rates to the applicable employees in the employee profile. Enterprise customers can reach out to Deputy Support to have these features enabled.

You can learn more about Fair Workweek law and how it may impact your business at "Fair Workweek made simple with Deputy". For detailed set-up and usage instructions, please visit "Introduction to setting up Fair Workweek".

What's new ✨

We've made some changes to the integrations marketplace inside Deputy to make it easier for you to know whether an integration was built by Deputy or not. This helps you know whether you can expect to setup the integration directly in Deputy, or whether you will need to do it inside the third party application.

Integrations which have been built by Deputy now have a tag of Deputy inside their application tile.

Integrations which have been built by a third party developer now have a tag of 3rd Party inside their application tile.

Along with this we have also made a change on the search functionality. When you search for an application inside the Deputy marketplace, we now connect to Zapier to see if the application is in the Zapier marketplace. For those unaware, Zapier is a middleware application that connections thousands of different applications with each other and Deputy has had an integration with Zapier for a number of years now.

When you perform a search results from Zapier will also now be included with the tag Zapier.

Clicking on this tile will take you to Zapier to help guide you through the process of getting Deputy connected to this application. With this change, we've added thousands of applications to our marketplace overnight and will bring more visibility than ever to our Zapier integration and the wide array of options it offers you when trying to solve business and integration problems.

Why 🤔

We've found sometimes users are confused with where an integration with Deputy needs to be setup, either in Deputy itself, or from a third party application. By directly labelling whether Deputy built the integration or not, it gives a clear indication as to where you will need to set the integration up. Along with this, including Zapier apps when searches are performed, gives visibility that there may be an alternate way to achieve what integration you are looking to setup.

How to use it 🤓

This change is live in the Deputy marketplace now so the next time you visit the integrations marketplace in your Deputy install, you will see these changes present.

What's new ✨

We have introduced a new business setting enabling you to hide regular working hours from the schedule! 

You may also know regular working hours as agreed hours or working hours - this is set to change in the product soon, with regular working hours being the unified term to describe agreements with team members on which regular days or hours they work. 

Why 🤔

We know that some businesses on Deputy do not use regular working hours for scheduling purposes. For these businesses, hiding regular working hours from the schedule can help reduce visual noise when scheduling. 

How to use it 🤓

As a system administrator, click on your name on the top right of the Deputy web app. Click on Business settings > Schedule and turn off the setting Show regular working hours on schedule

Once the setting is turned off, managers across the business should no longer see information related to regular working hours on the schedule. You can continue to use regular working hours for other purposes such as when setting up leave policies.

The new leave engine is able to calculate pro-rata leave entitlement for new joiners, which streamlines the process of determining holiday allowances for new employees based on their hire date. Previously, we only allowed the pro-rata calculation based on months, which is the UK default.

What's New! ✨

The ability to calculate pro-rata based on days is now available, along with control on other numerical parameters such as rounding the pro-rated value up/down and to half/nearest whole number, providing you with increased flexibility as to how the leave calculation is supposed to work. 

How does this work in the product?

To use this feature, customers simply turn on the “Pro-rate leave entitlement for team members that join throughout the year” checkbox in the Leave Policy Builder for a given policy and are then shown a button to configure all pro-rata settings (with sensible defaults populated). Please note that these settings is only available for “Fixed” yearly and “Based on agreed hours” accrual schedules.

Example 1:

• The leave year for a company runs from 1st January to 31st of December. Employees receive 28 days every year. Pro-rata settings are on – based on days, rounding up to the nearest half.
• Employee joins on the 22nd of February. Let’s assume it’s a leap year. Deputy will automatically calculate the leave as follows:

• 28 * (314/366) = 24.0218579235, rounded up to the nearest half, 24.5 days.

• The leave year runs from 1st April to 31st of March. Employees receive 33 days every year. Pro-rata settings are on – based on days, rounding down to the nearest whole.
• Employee joins on the 2nd of October. Let’s assume it’s a non leap year. Deputy will automatically calculate the leave as follows:

• 33 * (186/365) = 16.816, rounded down to the nearest whole number, 16 days.

Rollout

• Now available to every customer using the new leave experience on Deputy.
• The relevant help doc is updated and can be found here.