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Deputy - outstanding for rostering flexible staff
October 07, 2021

Deputy - outstanding for rostering flexible staff

Nick Read | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Deputy

Deputy is being used by our Health and Fitness facility to roster and communicate with approximately 20-25 of our coal facing staff. The biggest problem it addresses is rosters. It saves finance by improving the efficiency of middle management to create rosters, improves reporting and shift management by staff who require shift swaps or annual leave, and allows specific work communications to be addressed to the group i.e. weekly updates.
  • Rosters.
  • Auto prompts emails when changes are made.
  • Notifies management when shift changes are requested.
  • Accessible by desktop and app.
  • Auto Rostering and hour calculations for payroll.
  • The messenger feature could certainly use improvement. It tends to be suited to one way communication and doesn't allow reply's particularly easily (instead using comments). The potential addition of emoji's would assist to quickly surmise whether people have read comms and how they may feel about it. As a result, messenger (via FB messenger) appears to be default in our organisation when two way communications are required.
  • Significant amounts of time saved by rostering staff.
  • Improved accuracy with wage forecasting.
  • More transparency across the team - collegiality.
  • Ability to better understand work volumes.
We were unable to secure Microsoft Teams due to licensing issues within our organisation and weren't able to experience this to compare. Trello has been great for individuals to use but had little buy-in from teams. Google Sheets became a nightmare for ongoing rosters and required significant inputs and live changes. It added unnecessary stress and time to create. wheniwork.com was a relatively new start up but we found the user interface wasn't as aesthetically pleasing and therefore did not appeal to our younger workforce and consequently received little buy-in. We selected Deputy primarily for the rostering feature which has been effective and our staff have adopted this as the primary method to checking their times. It is particularly useful during public holidays when we have plan in advance and schedule hours, meaning that those not working are able to plan their holidays well in advance. If we did not have our own payroll system we would have loved that feature also. We also enjoy the modular payment method (based on users).

Do you think Deputy delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Deputy's feature set?

Yes

Did Deputy live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Deputy go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Deputy again?

Yes

In regards to the rostering it is easy to use for both management and staff which is why it got such a high rating. The messaging feature could be improved to make two way messaging more user friendly and we're not sold on the aesthetics of the whole thing overall. However, it is perfect for what we need it for. Ironically, we found that we used it a lot to begin with to tidy up our previous system, and have observed that it's used significantly less now because people appear to be on the same page.
Satisfied because change management is typically difficult to implement but once our staff realised the increased transparency and control they would have over their rosters (particularly the ability to swap shifts with their colleagues) then it was bought into relatively well. We allowed our coalfacing staff to be part of the trial version and asked for their feedback. Once it was agreed that we would sign up for the paid version we very quickly archived our former system to make sure that Deputy was quickly adopted.
Trello, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), Google Drive
Deputy is particularly useful if you are managing part-time, casual staff and/or staff who require flexible working hours. Deputy provides significantly more oversight than traditional excel or google sheet spreadsheets and the ability to offer shifts and approve/decline changes in shifts provides middle management with more oversight into the everyday running of staff, the calculable hours provide awareness of potential staff wages and hour allocations, and the instantaneous updates provided when changes are made are features that are worthwhile. I have advocated for this system across two other departments who face similar rostering challenges to ours.