Modern employees enjoy unprecedented levels of mobility: a single person can work from home on Monday, attend the office on Tuesday and take a business trip to the opposite side of the world for the rest of the week. Such high flexibility in terms of employee location is an excellent thing to have – it makes a team more satisfied. However, it’s also associated with significant management challenges.
For example, when your staff doesn’t have a fixed place to work, you may struggle to maintain a consistent employee experience throughout the organization. And if you fail to track each team member’s whereabouts, you are likely to become less productive and successful as a business.
Luckily, there’s a good solution for controlling employee locations without any adverse side effects. This solution is actiPLANS and its visual scheduling tools.
Let’s find out what it is and how to make it work.
What Is actiPLANS?
actiPLANS is a multifunctional and user-friendly software for absence and work management. It lets you plan out your team’s time in a flexible and straightforward way.
actiPLANS includes two visual timelines. You may apply one of them to submit leave requests and the other one – to schedule different kinds of work, including job sites and locations your team members rotate between.
Besides, actiPLANS has the following handy features:
- Informative reports that show how much time your team spends on different types of work and leave
- Automatic notifications that keep employees in the loop of all the changes in their work schedules
- Mobile app that lets you monitor colleagues’ availability, track time off and promptly notify others about lateness with just a few taps on the smartphone’s screen
With all this valuable functionality, actiPLANS makes it easy to manage employees’ time and locations without imposing excessive control over everything they do. In fact, you can even let your team members utilize actiPLANS as a self-scheduling tool and then simply check on the visual timeline to see where they plan to be every day.
In other words, actiPLANS adapts to any level of employee autonomy you prefer to exercise in your organization, which makes it suitable for virtually any team.
Who Can Benefit from Location Scheduling with actiPLANS
- Hybrid teams that combine remote work and office work in any preferable proportion
- Construction team members who move around different project sites and business facilities on a regular basis
- Field workers who deliver services across multiple clients’ locations
- Companies that practice job rotation
- Any other organization where employees are supposed to switch between job sites as part of their everyday work routine
How to Control Employee Locations Using actiPLANS
1. Add custom work locations to the system
actiPLANS lets you schedule any type of work that matches your unique situation and needs. Besides employee locations, these can be shifts, corporate events, project activities and much, much more.
You are also free to choose how many work types to create, which color codes to attach to them, how to categorize and name them.
For instance, if you have a hybrid team, you may suffice with just two location types: Remote Work and Office Work. And suppose you own multiple coffee shops across the city, you may dedicate separate location types to each of them: Manhattan Coffee Shop, Brooklyn Coffee Shop, Staten Island Coffee Shop and so on.
2. Assign the created locations to employees
Once your custom employee locations are added to actiPLANS, it’s time to open the visual timeline and start to allocate them across employees.
The timeline (aka the Work Scheduling interface) contains the list of your team members’ names and the date navigation panel. And provided that you have the schedule management permission in actiPLANS, you can use these features to plan out work locations for any period of time and any employee, whose data you have access to.
Meanwhile, each employee (even those without the abovementioned permission) can change their own work schedule and update it as they please. So, it’s up to you to decide who is to be responsible for the entire location scheduling process – managers or team members themselves.
3. Notify colleagues about schedule changes via email
Whenever a user’s work schedule gets modified, actiPLANS notifies them (or their manager) about the update automatically. It sends a comprehensive email message with all the new information one needs. Thus, you don’t have to take time and talk to colleagues about each schedule change yourself or worry that it may remain unnoticed.
4. Check the timeline to know where your team members are
Each actiPLANS user has free access to their work schedule. So, to see where they’re supposed to work, an employee simply needs to open the timeline, locate the necessary dates and read the color codes.
Besides, the Work Scheduling interface contains the info about their colleagues’ schedules. By checking on it regularly, one can easily stay aware of everyone’s locations and understand where to search for a particular teammate if necessary.
5. See how much time your team spends in different locations
The Work Types report provides a detailed breakdown of all the time your employees spend at different work sites. You can analyze this data using the visual graph or scrutinize the figures in the table format. Plus, you can configure the report in line with your needs – display information for specific time periods, group it by organizational departments or exclude some location types from the view.
One of the possible ways to utilize the Work Types report to your benefit is by comparing the data on the use of time across locations with your team’s productivity results (which you may log using various KPI tools or a performance tracker like actiTIME).
Suppose such analysis shows that employees complete fewer tasks or show slower progress in some locations and tend to perform better in others, you may adjust your workplace policy and encourage employees to work from the latter place more frequently.
6. Embrace the power of mobile connectivity
When employees move from one job site to another and never stay in the same place for long, it’s fairly hard to keep track of what they’re up to without a good mobile app.
actiPLANS Mobile allows your team to track colleagues’ absences and availability on the go. With its help, you can:
- Submit leave requests in a matter of seconds
- Notify others about lateness or early departure from the workplace
- Write comments to elaborate on any other changes in your personal work schedule
- Check who’s present at work, who’s on vacation and for how long
In combo with the web-based version of actiPLANS, the app makes it incredibly easy to keep employee schedules under control and manage resources more efficiently.
Ready to try out these essential actiPLANS features yourself? Sign up for a free online trial and start to manage employee schedules and locations in the simplest way possible.
