It's not uncommon to need an extra employee (or more) at the last minute. Perhaps someone called in sick or maybe the day turned out to be far busier than you anticipated.

Whatever the reason, Shift Broadcasts helps you automatically communicate to all available and eligible employees that you need their help.

❗️ For (hopefully) obvious reasons, you can only broadcast a shift that hasn't yet started and is within a published rota.

👀 Find out more in our Spotlight Session 'How to become a shift swap & shift broadcast hero'.

You can broadcast an open shift, or a shift that's already assigned to someone. In either case, if someone responds and accepts, the original shift will be left untouched (a swap doesn't take place).

Rotaready will identify everyone who is available and eligible to work the shift, using the same validation that would take place if you tried to assign them the shift on the rota, such as tags, availability and contractual hours.

The resulting pool of individuals will receive an instant notification via the Rotaready app, inviting them to review the shift and accept or reject the broadcast. Their responses will be collated for you on the broadcast summary.

Employees who accept will be automatically assigned a copy of the shift and the rota will be updated accordingly. As the broadcast initiator, you'll also be notified of their response.

As soon as your number of required employees is reached, the broadcast will finish and anybody yet to respond won't be able to.

In the rota editor, an active shift broadcast is marked by the megaphone icon on a shift. By clicking on the shift and clicking View broadcast, you can review a list of the employees contacted and their responses.

You can stop a broadcast at any time by clicking Finish broadcasting.

👀 Shift broadcast information is kept for six months, after which time the data associated with them is deleted. The shifts that were assigned as a result of the broadcast will always remain in place.