Looking for scheduling and workforce management software to help run your best agency but don’t know where to start?
Looking for scheduling and workforce management software to help run your best agency but don’t know where to start?
Choosing a scheduling software for your agency is no easy task, since it seems like there are too many options. However, while there may be thousands of generic scheduling software, it simply cannot accommodate for the unique and complex organizational rules that public safety scheduling has to adhere to.
And you may already be researching scheduling software made for public safety. But are they truly built with public safety needs in mind? And can it really make your agency run better or will it worsen conditions? The consequence of going with a scheduling software that is not robust enough and adaptable to your agency can be detrimental. It can waste agency resources and time, worsen officer fatigue which negatively impacts team morale and eventually, increase turnover. These impacts and more can leave your agency vulnerable to a myriad of risks and liabilities.
Thankfully, InTime, scheduling and workforce management purpose-built for public safety accounts for these considerations. In fact, through decades of experience in this industry and expertise from law enforcement professionals with more than 100 years of experience, we have a software solution that can adapt to any agency needs with operational efficiency in mind. With public safety being its number #1 priority, we aim to help agencies work more efficiently, spend smarter, reduce risk, and better engage your team.
Read on to learn how InTime is the best fit scheduling and
workforce management software for your agency.
Work Efficiently
One of the main reasons that agencies purchase scheduling and workforce management software is to work more efficiently. Without the right software, scheduling can drain your personnel resources. InTime has a solution that is made to remove the administrative burden by liberating your team’s time.
Clear out the clutter with configurable schedule views.
The first aspect of how InTime helps you work more efficiently is enhancing your agency visibility. InTime’s scheduling interface allows you to see everything in a single screen. Everything is in one place, meaning you can make changes, post shifts, see your schedule, and more, without having to switch screens. You can also configure your view of the schedule either by team, location, activity, employee and/or by filter, so you can minimize the noise and only see the data that is relevant to you.
Make it easy to use.
Making changes easily and accurately is one of the biggest contributors to working more efficiently. With InTime, you can make shift postings or any changes to your schedule in very few clicks. You’re also able to make changes to a group of people at once. For example, if you wanted to select a group and place them in training or extend their shifts, you can do so collectively at the same time. InTime also allows you to edit multiple schedules at a time.
Of course, along with making such easy changes, it’s crucial that these changes are tracked and reported. And with InTime, all changes are tracked so it’s easy to see who made them and when, allowing for a robust audit trail.
Fill vacancies quickly and easily.
Schedulers are challenged with finding qualified staff to fill shifts. While that’s already a large challenge, it’s crucial to be able to do this in a timely manner. With InTime, finding qualified staff is easy through ‘attributes’. Essentially, you have the ability to attach any attributes to any employee such as their gender, any spoken languages, trained or weapon skills. There is a lot of flexibility with these attributes and there is no limit as to what you can tag as an attribute. Once you tag these attributes to an employee, you can filter based on these attributes and find people who are or aren’t qualified for certain shifts. This enables you to find qualified staff in a matter of seconds, not days.
Reduce Risk
Public safety is a demanding industry where a mistake can be very costly. InTime has a solution that helps your agency proactively mitigate risks and liabilities.
Ensuring the right people get the right shifts.
One of the activities that help protect your agency from risk is ensuring that you have the right staff at the right time. InTime’s ability to quickly find qualified staff is a big contributor as to why it is the #1 scheduling software in this industry. In InTime, you can pre-build union and agency rules into the software. With your rules already set, InTime finds you the best staff to work your shifts automatically, eliminating human error. This also includes union rules related to overtime where it’s important to ensure equitable distribution. You also have the option to post to a certain group of people who you know are qualified. This eliminates risk, such as grievances, while saving you hours of time.
Adhere to Rules
Another unique feature of InTime that protects your agency from risk is that it already has FLSA rules built into the program. This feature can be turned off or on based on your agency requirements.
Levels of Approval/User Role permissions
Another aspect to limiting agency risk is allowing a select few to make important changes. With InTime, you can give user role permissions that are fully configurable. This means you can set what each person on your staff can view and what they can edit. For example, setting a person on your staff to only have a view only role, while another person on your staff has a reports-only role.
Another factor to limiting risk is the ability to set up to three levels of approval for leave requests and timesheets. This ensures that everyone is on the same page, and approving a request is easy. Simply click ‘Approve’ and your staff will be notified in real-time.
Oversight and Reporting
Another way to be proactive in eliminating agency risk and liabilities is through robust reporting and insights. InTime’s reports and dashboards drive accountability and fairness by giving you insight into overtime allocation, leave approvals, and union compliance so you can better hold your agency accountable. At a higher level, InTime dashboards give you insights to help your agency run at its best. It gives you key information for areas such as officer wellness, agency spend, existing risk, and leave forecasts. Easily customize the most important insights for your agency and have a dashboard ready at your fingertips. With around 95 built-in reports, you can rest easy knowing you’re saving countless hours pulling together spreadsheets and data.
Engage Your Team
Public safety is already a demanding job and adding an administrative workload to an already full plate can impact your team’s engagement and stress levels. InTime allows you to improve employee administrative quality of life for your team and ultimately, boost officer wellness. Here are a couple ways that InTime helps engage your team.
Two-Way Communication
InTime enables your employees to stay in the loop with all agency activities by having their schedule and other critical information accessible, in real-time. With the InTime software and mobile app, employees can easily see new overtime shifts and sign-up for them immediately. Any approvals or rejections for vacation or leave requests are notified in real-time through push notifications on the fully optimized, InTime Mobile. Staff can sign up for shifts within a matter of seconds through InTime Desktop, InTime Web, or InTime Mobile and get notified of their status in the palm of their hand. Supervisors can also post shifts and make approvals or rejections easily through a push of a button. This boosts employee engagement by allowing two-way communication and reducing the administrative workload so they can get back to doing what matters most.
Spend Smarter
A good scheduling software will help your agency do more with less. Having a robust visibility and rich insights enables your agency to recover costs and optimize personnel resources and spend.
Optimize Personnel Resources
Not every staffing dip is an overtime situation. InTime’s coverage levels intelligence allows you to view your agency from a bird’s eye view in order to optimize staffing and mitigate unnecessary call-ins. It’s easy to take on more overtime with agency leave if you don’t have the insight to forecast leave trends. However, with InTime’s rich reporting and dashboards, you can track and forecast agency leave so it’s easy to get ahead of the curve with a proactive staffing strategy.
Take Control of Your Budget
InTime’s robust reports and dashboard enables you to granularly track the dollars and cents of your agency’s overtime by reason, team, group, location and employee so you get to the root causes of overage. It also allows you to automatically track time associated with grants. This simplifies your reimbursement process to minutes and optimizes your funding.
Ecosystem built for public safety
It’s not just our software that’s built for public safety, but it’s every facet of InTime. From having industry specific additional modules to a support and implementation staff well-seasoned in public safety, InTime is built to ensure success.
Ecosystem built for public safety
It’s not just our software that’s built for public safety, but it’s every facet of InTime. From having industry specific additional modules to a support and implementation staff well-seasoned in public safety, InTime is built to ensure success.
Industry Specific Additional Modules
We have a variety of robust additional modules that cater to the complex needs of public safety. These include timekeeping, shift bidding, court and subpoena, training management, and asset management. While there may be other scheduling solutions that provide a similar offering, InTime is one of the only services that fully integrates these modules into your schedule. They don’t sit in a silos, but rather it becomes integrated into the schedule and becomes part of the total solution. With InTime, you can say goodbye to switching from one screen to the other.
Public Safety Pedigree
With over 20 years of industry experience, we know public safety. That’s why we hire implementation and training staff with over 25 years of public safety experience each to ensure our customers get the guidance they need to tailor InTime to their unique needs.
World-class Support
InTime is all about supporting our customers in their use of our software. We have a rich Knowledge Hub for on-demand resources, or contact support directly to get high-touch, personalized support that helps us maintain our incredible 97% customer retention rate.
Annual User Conference
InTime cares about building a public safety community. InTime University is our annual user conference that helps connect, train, and develop our customer community of like minded public safety professionals. Become a customer and join us at InTime U, a one-of-a-kind, immersive training and leadership development experience.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that there are a myriad of factors to watch out for when searching for scheduling software for public safety. And it’s crucial to not only assess the software, but also the whole package that the provider offers. Thankfully, InTime has a robust full package offering. From our software itself, to our world-class support, to our annual conference, InTime is built to ensure success on every facet. Public safety is our passion and we’re dedicated to helping agencies run better. If you’re curious to see what InTime is all about, click here to talk to a product specialist to find out.
When you talk about InTime being the complete package- I’m talking about the software, the customer support and the conference, the whole big package. I could not be more happy with InTime. It's better than any other software that we’ve purchased.”
Mike Beard
Major, Boone County Sheriff’s Office
