By CASEY McINTOSH
How does your depart- ment handle last-minute staffing emergencies? Are your managers spending countless hours on the phone, practically begging employees to come back to work? Are you still relying on outdated alpha pager technologies and manually maintaining a spreadsheet to rank and notify your employees?
If your organization struggles to fill open work shifts, CallBackStaffing.com can eliminate the headaches associated with overtime and open shift scheduling. Designed by a career firefighter, the system rivals all other high-cost scheduling systems for a fraction of the price. For an open shift opportunity, managers can simply log in and select the type of employee needed to fill the shift, and the system takes over. Its features are perfect for career and combination fire departments, emergency medical services, and law enforcement agencies.
 |
 |
| Photos courtesy of author. |
The system automatically generates a properly ranked list of all eligible employees who match the criteria for your shift. For example, users can be easily excluded if they are already scheduled to be at work for that day or if they have selected to be “unavailable” for that day in their unique Availability Calendar. Depending on each user’s personal preference, he is then contacted by a text (SMS) message, automated phone call, or alpha page notification with the shift details. Every employee is given a predetermined amount of time to respond to the callback before the system moves on to the next on the list.
Employees respond directly to the callback by text message or the automated touch-tone phone interface. Users can also log into their personal Web profile at any time to see all available work shifts—and accept or deny them at any time. If an employee misses the call or is unable to respond immediately, he can call the toll-free phone number and hear the shifts available to him. On successful fulfillment of the work shift, employees are then automatically reordered on the list, depending on organizational procedures. This ensures the system is fair and equitable and the right employees are being called in the right order—every time.
Deadlines can be set for shift fulfillment, ensuring that last-minute open work shifts are filled fast and that employees are given plenty of time to consider those future work shifts. Managers can fill multiple positions at once by simply selecting the number of employees needed for the shift. This simplifies staffing an extra engine or making parade or event callbacks.
The system is fair, equitable, and user (firefighter)-friendly. Employees can log in at any time and see their current rank in the system as well as view detailed history logs for all previous callbacks and notifications. Users can be assigned to any number of groups (shifts, specialty assignment, and so on) for quick and easy notifications. Multiple titles can be assigned to employees for an employee who can fill multiple roles (i.e., a firefighter who can bump up to a captain role).
Custom lists sorting rules are implemented for every department. Does your organization dictate that only those employees who have a certain amount of overtime hours be contacted first or that employees who accept a work shift are automatically moved to the back of the “list”? Any sorting rule can be easily accommodated and customized to your needs.
Along with the flagship CallBack feature, group notifications can be quickly sent as well. You can relay important messages to all of your employees, select groups, or your captains such as “Meeting reminder next Tuesday, 6 p.m.” or your hazmat team such as “Hazmat spill, all team members report.” Users receive the messages instantly by their preference of phone call, text message, or alpha page.
You can broadcast important messages to your staff fast and send text messages, phone calls, or alpha pager messages instantly by the “Group Notification” feature. Designed with feedback from fire departments across the country, the system is always in active development, with new features added frequently. “Beta user” departments are needed for a commitment-free, fully functional, 30-day trial period.
CASEY McINTOSH is a 10-year fire service veteran. He has served the past eight years as a career firefighter for Grants Pass (OR) Fire/Rescue. He has an associate of applied arts degree in fire science and is a fire science instructor at Rogue Community College. McIntosh is an active Internet developer with a keen interest in new Web technologies.
