Before we jump right into how you will configure settings so that you can begin scheduling your staff to the respective shifts in your residential settings, let’s first touch on the core functionality available. Shift Scheduling in OnTarget allows you to assign clients, employees and shifts to specific sites.  Eligible staff are scheduled for designated shifts at each site, typically a group home or similar setting that requires 24/7 staff coverage. The schedules can be validated to ensure staffing requirements are met for the corresponding services. Notes can be launched from the shift schedules and each staff member associated to the shift can sign off on the note. Staff can pick up shifts or add themselves to shifts as needed, per appropriate security permissions. Staff can also be required to clock-in and out of shifts for time and attendance. This course will focus on the system configuration that is required in order to leverage these feature sets.   

Let’s start at securities. It will be important to ensure that the users responsible for this configuration have the proper access, along with being able to designate the proper access for all other users needing to leverage this functionality.

There are several key menus that the users who will be responsible for configuring the system so that all sites and shifts are setup and employees are linked to the sites in which they are eligible to work. These settings are typically only necessary for the managers or super-users who handle system setup. These security settings generally don’t need to be applied to the direct care staff providing the services and writing the notes. First, go to employees to enable the tab called Assign Sites. This will allow users to link staff to the locations they are eligible to work in. This assignment is critical when it comes to scheduling so that the system can present which staff you can assign to the site specific shifts. Be sure to enable this for all roles who will be the ones managing these assignments. Expand Employees section. Check Assigned Sites. Then let’s open up access for users that will be responsible for entering the shifts onto the scheduler. These settings are what allow you to do the scheduling: Expand Scheduling section. Notice you have 2 options – you can either check to allow the shift scheduling of clients or to allow scheduling of employee but you can also do both. I imagine that the majority of the time you would have someone scheduling both the clients and employees at the same time and therefore both boxes would be checked, but in the event that different individuals manage when clients will be in the homes vs which staff will be covering the shifts, then you have the option to separate out the securities to force them to only do one of the pieces of the scheduling. So only check here if this role is responsible for scheduling the client(s) to the site but not responsible for also scheduling staff. And only check if role is responsible for scheduling the employee(s) to the site but not responsible for also scheduling clients or check both

Next, another key component of the initial setup is to designate which sites require staff to cover shifts.    

Expand Sites section.   

Check Add/Edit/Delete accordingly.   

Check Group Scheduling. There are 2 more critical configuration points. One is to specify which services require staffing in the common 24/7 shift cycle – doesn’t have to be 24/7 – but that is the most common use case. To designate these services enable the security setting by:

Expanding Services   

Check Site

Scheduling. And the last one is to open up the menu that allows you to define your shifts:

Expand Configure  

Expand List Configuration

Expand Scheduling

Check Shifts.  

These are just the settings that open the corresponding parts of the system so that you can being customizing the various services and sites you’ll want to schedule shifts for. As mentioned already these are the typical settings for your manager roles, or the ones who are most familiar with how you provide your residential type services.

There is one other security item to review and that is how you turn on the access for the direct care staff. They typically will not be entering in the schedules and setting the system up, so the security settings are bit easier since they are more limited in what they can do.  

The recommended Direct Care Staff Security Permissions are to give them viewing rights only (no editing rights) to the schedulers To do so go to Configure →

 Security → Configure Roles. Expand Scheduling section. Check All Calendars (Read Only). This makes it easy for them to see when they are supposed to work and what their supervisors expectations are. You may choose to give them full rights if they will be responsible for adding and updating their own schedules.   The recommended rights are to leave them at Read – Only and then provide some flexibility with their interaction on the scheduler by allowing them to pick-up a shift in order to be able to fill-in for another staff member and not rely on a supervisor to make the schedule change. An important part of this workflow is that When the staff pick-up another staff’s shift (someone who has not yet clocked in or started a note for the shift), the supervisor will get an automated task alerting them of the schedule change. Likewise, it is recommended to allow them to Add Self to Shift for some added flexibility. This allows them to be able to assign themselves to a shift, thereby adding an additional staff member to the shift for coverage purposes (as opposed to replacing another staff member in the above pick up shift feature). The supervisor will also get an automatic task when this occurs notifying them of the schedule change.  

That completes the security settings. Keep moving in this course to now learn how to do the things that you just enabled access to.