Yodels founders have worked in hospitality (specifically fast food) for over 30 years between them, during this time they learnt a universal truth, SHIFT FILLING SUCKS! If you have worked in hospitality, retail, health, pretty much any industry that has shift workers you know this already. It happens constantly, someone calls in saying they can’t come into work and the manager is stuck trying to get someone to come in. Customers suffer, other staff suffer and the manager suffers. In conclusion SHIFT FILLING SUCKS!
People call in saying they can’t come into work for many reasons. Our founders have heard them all, a favourite was a gentleman who claimed he couldn’t come into work for “social reasons”. Though you will always have the calls that are questionable most calls are legitimate, make sure you treat your staff this way. Despite this legitimacy this doesn’t make filling shifts any easier and the impacts to the business are wide and varied.
Shift filling might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things however the impacts to businesses can be quite dramatic. There are direct impacts such as; impact on your customers, sales, production of your kitchen/warehouse/factory. But what businesses often fail to take into consideration is the indirect impacts such as morale. Morale of the manager who constantly trying to get someone to come into work, the morale of the staff members who have to work harder because they are trying to cover for the missing staff member. This can lead to higher levels of staff turnover, reduced productivity and customers having less faith in your businesses because the staff just look unhappy.
Over the years our founders and many other businesses have tried and failed to implement a wide range of bandaid solutions. We have seen Facebook used as a solution with it failing due to it being mismanaged and creating people problems. We have tried phone calls, but they a massively time consuming and staff start screening your calls. A favourite solution fail was when one of our founders entered over 400 staff into his phone and was mass group messages and he received a letter explaining the fair use policy of his phone plan.
This is why we created Yodel, shift filling sucks and we want to fix it. All the problems that filling shifts creates and the lack of a practical, reliable solution meant we had a mission. We wanted to make shift filling easy and we knew it had to be easy and quick to use, so we worked with the mantra for our platform that “if you can’t do it in 30 seconds then it’s not going to be useful”. So here we are a couple of retail managers turned tech gurus and we want to help businesses. To find out more contact us at www.yodelit.co
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