[choward2]

Hey Ken,?

I used WhenToWork at Wayne State and we’re using SubItUp here at Stony Brook now so I’ve been on both sides of the aisle – happy to schedule some time to walk you through how we use it. Ours is set up across all of the office of Student Life, and in our little Operations corner of it I schedule about 150-200 ~3hr shifts per week across 6 positions. But the main gist:

Pros:

• Once the schedule is set, it’s relatively easy to approve add/drops and make sure people are showing up
• Having the built-in time clock is great; super easy to use to make adjustments if someone missed a clock in, see who’s currently clocked in, and to verify against while approving hours
• You can set up specific iPads to clock in for specific positions, and you can see in the details of the clock in which iPad they clocked in/out on if you allow multiple iPads for the same position
• If your students work for more than just your department and you’re all on the same SubItUp account, it will be able to track global weekly hours even if you’re not a manager of the position or see the shifts they’re scheduled for
• You can set up SSO login if that security feature is preferred/in use at your school
• Their support is fairly responsive, but doesn’t always have solutions needed (for us, we get an email when someone hasn’t shown up within 10 minutes of their shift start time, but we don’t get the follow up email we’re supposed to get that tells us that they finally did clock in, and they’ve been working on that for some time now with no answers yet)
• They have a lot of video documentation explaining things, but sometimes they could be more useful

Cons:

• Having the same people work multiple positions can be frustrating; people can’t directly swap across positions (i.e., if two people can each work in the game room and the info desk, they’re not allowed to directly swap their shifts unless both shifts are the same position), and you sometimes have to repeat steps for each position (approving RTO, copying availability, etc.)
• Entering availability can be a bit complex; you can set your positions to either shift-based availability or hourly-based availability. Shift-based availability is relatively easy to set up (pick a day of the week, then highlight the time at the top to say “Available”, “No Preference”, or “Unavailable”, and it applies that preference to all shifts that fully fall in that time), but if you create any shift that wasn’t a template when you entered a person’s availability then no preference is recorded until you re-enter the availability. This is because it doesn’t save that highlighted block of time you entered; it just saves the specific shift templates that are active that fit in that time. Hourly-based gives you this flexibility, but with its own caveats: in particular, you have to enter every individual week (or copy over from the previous, and copy between positions), and if you copy onto a week that already has availability, it doesn’t replace it – it just stacks it on top, so you have to completely erase the position’s availability before re-entering it if there are changes. Also, you can’t just delete an entire day/week; you can either delete individual shifts or you can delete the entire position’s availability and start over. Changes/updates can get very tedious.
• Scheduling (in particular the auto-populate feature) also is a bit wonky – it seems that it always runs through the same process every single time (so if you deleted all the shifts and ran the auto-populate again, it would turn out exactly the same). It does its best to try and spread hours fairly, but it seems to get thrown off by both the hourly-based availability setting and (even if you’re using the shift-based availability) if you’re scheduling the same people across different positions. I consistently end up with 7-8 people with 7-8 shifts per week while others get 1 or even 0, before having to sort back through it all and reassign a good chunk of it.
• The app that most of our students use to view their schedules is pretty buggy; sometimes it’ll just show a black screen, or it won’t show their availability, or it just won’t open. Even some of the “features” can be bugs – if you have any shifts that extend past midnight and straddle two days, the shift will show up on each day’s availability, but it gives absolutely no identification of which day it starts on (so a 9pm-12am shift Monday night will show up as 9pm-12am on both their Monday schedule and Tuesday schedule, which has thrown people off quite a bit). A lot of that is alleviated by logging in through a browser where you can view a whole week’s schedule, but most of them use the app, so…we get a lot of questions and confused students showing up for ghost shifts.
• Different features that seem related are sometimes buried in completely different sub-menus that don’t logically seem connected, so there’s a bit of backtracking around until you figure your way around
• If you manage multiple positions, in different menus you’ll have to specify which positions you’re looking for in that particular menu. While this seems logical, it seems to have a weird memory where some menus you’ll have certain positions loaded, then when you move to a seemingly related menu, it loads completely different positions. If you’re not careful, it easy to get tripped up by it and/or miss something

I know that’s a big block of text, but let me know if you’d like to find a time to take a look behind the curtain!

Christopher Howard
Operations and Events Manager
Stony Brook University

——————————
Christopher Howard
Operations and Events Manager
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook NY
(631) 632-4556
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 04-03-2024 16:18
From: Ken Beck
Subject: When to Work Replacement – SubItUp?

Hello All,

As I’m sure many of you are aware, When to Work has announced they are eliminating their base plan and requiring everyone to move to the “pro plan.” Our office is not interested in the pro plan, as it does not add any functionality we have wanted. It also more than doubles our annual subscription cost. We are looking at SubItUp but they have had such an increase in business they just cancelled the demo we scheduled with them.

1. What other scheduling software are people using for scheduling student employees?
2. Does anyone use SubItUp?
   1. How do you like it?
   2. Would you be willing to jump on a Zoom and show me the basics of what it looks like? We aren’t ready to commit without being able to see the software and they are willing to do a demo anymore.

Best,

——————————
–
Ken Beck
(he/him/his)
Associate Director of Student Life Operations
University of Rochester | Wilson Commons Student Activities
kenneth.beck@rochester.edu
——————————

[Ken Beck]

Thank you Chris! This is exactly what I was looking for. I appreciate you breaking it down into the pros and cons. You hit on a few things I hadn’t even thought to ask about (like what happens when a shift extends past 12am). I’ll let you know if I have more questions!

——————————
–
Ken Beck
(he/him/his)
Associate Director of Student Life Operations
University of Rochester | Wilson Commons Student Activities
kenneth.beck@rochester.edu
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 04-07-2024 00:54
From: Christopher Howard
Subject: When to Work Replacement – SubItUp?

Hey Ken, 

I used WhenToWork at Wayne State and we’re using SubItUp here at Stony Brook now so I’ve been on both sides of the aisle – happy to schedule some time to walk you through how we use it. Ours is set up across all of the office of Student Life, and in our little Operations corner of it I schedule about 150-200 ~3hr shifts per week across 6 positions. But the main gist:

Pros:

• Once the schedule is set, it’s relatively easy to approve add/drops and make sure people are showing up
• Having the built-in time clock is great; super easy to use to make adjustments if someone missed a clock in, see who’s currently clocked in, and to verify against while approving hours
• You can set up specific iPads to clock in for specific positions, and you can see in the details of the clock in which iPad they clocked in/out on if you allow multiple iPads for the same position
• If your students work for more than just your department and you’re all on the same SubItUp account, it will be able to track global weekly hours even if you’re not a manager of the position or see the shifts they’re scheduled for
• You can set up SSO login if that security feature is preferred/in use at your school
• Their support is fairly responsive, but doesn’t always have solutions needed (for us, we get an email when someone hasn’t shown up within 10 minutes of their shift start time, but we don’t get the follow up email we’re supposed to get that tells us that they finally did clock in, and they’ve been working on that for some time now with no answers yet)
• They have a lot of video documentation explaining things, but sometimes they could be more useful

Cons:

• Having the same people work multiple positions can be frustrating; people can’t directly swap across positions (i.e., if two people can each work in the game room and the info desk, they’re not allowed to directly swap their shifts unless both shifts are the same position), and you sometimes have to repeat steps for each position (approving RTO, copying availability, etc.)
• Entering availability can be a bit complex; you can set your positions to either shift-based availability or hourly-based availability. Shift-based availability is relatively easy to set up (pick a day of the week, then highlight the time at the top to say “Available”, “No Preference”, or “Unavailable”, and it applies that preference to all shifts that fully fall in that time), but if you create any shift that wasn’t a template when you entered a person’s availability then no preference is recorded until you re-enter the availability. This is because it doesn’t save that highlighted block of time you entered; it just saves the specific shift templates that are active that fit in that time. Hourly-based gives you this flexibility, but with its own caveats: in particular, you have to enter every individual week (or copy over from the previous, and copy between positions), and if you copy onto a week that already has availability, it doesn’t replace it – it just stacks it on top, so you have to completely erase the position’s availability before re-entering it if there are changes. Also, you can’t just delete an entire day/week; you can either delete individual shifts or you can delete the entire position’s availability and start over. Changes/updates can get very tedious.
• Scheduling (in particular the auto-populate feature) also is a bit wonky – it seems that it always runs through the same process every single time (so if you deleted all the shifts and ran the auto-populate again, it would turn out exactly the same). It does its best to try and spread hours fairly, but it seems to get thrown off by both the hourly-based availability setting and (even if you’re using the shift-based availability) if you’re scheduling the same people across different positions. I consistently end up with 7-8 people with 7-8 shifts per week while others get 1 or even 0, before having to sort back through it all and reassign a good chunk of it.
• The app that most of our students use to view their schedules is pretty buggy; sometimes it’ll just show a black screen, or it won’t show their availability, or it just won’t open. Even some of the “features” can be bugs – if you have any shifts that extend past midnight and straddle two days, the shift will show up on each day’s availability, but it gives absolutely no identification of which day it starts on (so a 9pm-12am shift Monday night will show up as 9pm-12am on both their Monday schedule and Tuesday schedule, which has thrown people off quite a bit). A lot of that is alleviated by logging in through a browser where you can view a whole week’s schedule, but most of them use the app, so…we get a lot of questions and confused students showing up for ghost shifts.
• Different features that seem related are sometimes buried in completely different sub-menus that don’t logically seem connected, so there’s a bit of backtracking around until you figure your way around
• If you manage multiple positions, in different menus you’ll have to specify which positions you’re looking for in that particular menu. While this seems logical, it seems to have a weird memory where some menus you’ll have certain positions loaded, then when you move to a seemingly related menu, it loads completely different positions. If you’re not careful, it easy to get tripped up by it and/or miss something

I know that’s a big block of text, but let me know if you’d like to find a time to take a look behind the curtain!

Christopher Howard
Operations and Events Manager
Stony Brook University

——————————
Christopher Howard
Operations and Events Manager
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook NY
(631) 632-4556
——————————

Original Message:
Sent: 04-03-2024 16:18
From: Ken Beck
Subject: When to Work Replacement – SubItUp?

Hello All,

As I’m sure many of you are aware, When to Work has announced they are eliminating their base plan and requiring everyone to move to the “pro plan.” Our office is not interested in the pro plan, as it does not add any functionality we have wanted. It also more than doubles our annual subscription cost. We are looking at SubItUp but they have had such an increase in business they just cancelled the demo we scheduled with them.

1. What other scheduling software are people using for scheduling student employees?
2. Does anyone use SubItUp?
   1. How do you like it?
   2. Would you be willing to jump on a Zoom and show me the basics of what it looks like? We aren’t ready to commit without being able to see the software and they are willing to do a demo anymore.

Best,

——————————
–
Ken Beck
(he/him/his)
Associate Director of Student Life Operations
University of Rochester | Wilson Commons Student Activities
kenneth.beck@rochester.edu
——————————

[Caitlin Lindsay]

Hi Ken,

I oversee our Student Center at Rice University and we’re using a tool called ConnectTeam. I’m happy to set up a time to show you what it looks like. It’s worked great for our information desk/building managers (we can do onboarding trainings, scheduling, shift changes, has a great mobile app, knowledge base where we store information and documents, etc.). It also has three categories (Communication, Operations, and HR & Skills) each which have multiple tiers, so you can purchase based off your needs. If helpful to chat more, feel free to email me at cml18@rice.edu.

——————————
Caitlin Lindsay
Associate Director of Facilities, Events, and Student Run Bu
Rice University
Houston TX
(713) 334-3530
——————————
——————————————-
Original Message:
Sent: 04-03-2024 16:18
From: Ken Beck
Subject: When to Work Replacement – SubItUp?

Hello All,

As I’m sure many of you are aware, When to Work has announced they are eliminating their base plan and requiring everyone to move to the “pro plan.” Our office is not interested in the pro plan, as it does not add any functionality we have wanted. It also more than doubles our annual subscription cost. We are looking at SubItUp but they have had such an increase in business they just cancelled the demo we scheduled with them.

1. What other scheduling software are people using for scheduling student employees?
2. Does anyone use SubItUp?
   1. How do you like it?
   2. Would you be willing to jump on a Zoom and show me the basics of what it looks like? We aren’t ready to commit without being able to see the software and they are willing to do a demo anymore.

Best,

——————————
–
Ken Beck
(he/him/his)
Associate Director of Student Life Operations
University of Rochester | Wilson Commons Student Activities
kenneth.beck@rochester.edu
——————————