It’s that time again, our product wrap is here! And this release is packed with updates designed to simplify your complex admin tasks, and save time on your team’s day-to-day. Over the past few months, we’ve focussed heavily on bringing you major updates in scheduling, compliance and team communication — and if you’re a Deputy HR subscriber, you’ll see we’ve been especially busy building out features that give you even greater control over compliance and engagement.
Dive in below to see how these updates will save you time, further automate your people processes, and help you get back to focussing on your team. Or you can watch our 4 minute summary with Coach Micaela.
New product spotlight: Messaging and Messaging+
Is your team still stuck in email and group text threads? If you want to stop guessing who’s actually on the clock and reach the right team the first time, this is the update for you!
We’ve officially launched Messaging+ as your built-in communication tool, ready to turn chaos into clarity.
While your current plan already includes our powerful Deputy Messaging tool, Messaging+ adds key functionality your managers will love, including shift-based presence indicators (showing you exactly who’s on shift, on break or away right now) and smart mentions (like @onshift to reach the right people instantly), as well as loads of other capabilities to help scale your business communications. Learn more about Messaging and Messaging+ here.
What else is new?
Build your schedule faster with shift patterns
Ready to stop building custom schedules week by week? With shift pattern templates, you can instantly create recurring patterns like “three days on, three days off,” saving time and keeping your schedule aligned with your team’s needs.
Update all leave balances across your team, in one go
Managing leave balances at scale during onboarding or when moving leave data between systems used to be a time-consuming, manual task. With the new ability to import all your leave balances in bulk you can efficiently update leave data across the entire team using a simple spreadsheet upload. This helps to reduce friction, improve data accuracy and gives you complete control over your leave management imports.
A new, streamlined way to navigate your business settings
We’ve given our entire Business Settings a revamp to make it even easier to find and manage the settings you need. With a streamlined layout and clearer organisation, you can enjoy a faster, smoother experience across your account settings, as we continue to add more products and functionality.
Filter your schedule faster, with Advanced Scheduling Filters
Scheduling at scale requires efficient tools, and you told us that being able to filter your schedule efficiently was a missing piece of the puzzle. That’s why we’re excited to share that we’ve made some big improvements to how you apply filters on the schedule. You can now apply a combination of filters, including Team Member, Training Tags, Stress Profiles, Availability and more, to pinpoint exactly what you need to manage.
More flexibility and control within Leave Management policies
We’ve had four mighty updates within ourLeave Management product to provide even more flexibility with how you offer leave to your team, while also increasing operational efficiency.
Set leave balance limits
Within our Leave policy builder, you can now set positive or negative balance limits, to best reflect the policy you have in place across your business (for example, allowing employees to go into 2 days of negative leave).Set approval guardrails that make sense
If an employee exceeds their allowed limit of leave, you can choose whether to block the request automatically, or allow the request through with automatic notifications to their assigned managers.Smart calendar year logic
This update ensures that leave limits are only applied to requests starting in the current calendar year, while allowing requests for the future year to be processed separately.Individual policy control
You can now set different limits and enforcement rules, including those mentioned above, for each different leave type across your organisation.
New to Analytics+
Analytics reports, now refresh 6x faster!
We know timely, accurate data is critical to your operation. That’s why we’ve cut the refresh time for all reports and data sets from 24 hours to just four! This means you get the insights you need faster, helping your teams make decisions more effectively.
Coming later this week, new Analytics+ reports…
We've added new pre-built reports to help you optimize labor costs with deeper insights into hours, costs, and pay accuracy
Daily hours breakdown: Monitoring daily hours by team member, area, and location to monitor labor activity and verify financial records.
Hours & cost summary: Tracking worked hours and labor costs across locations, areas, and team members for accurate payroll and cost control.
Salaried & hourly team members: Showing how labor costs are split between salaried and hourly staff to optimise spending across locations.
Pay details: Making it easy to audit team member pay configurations to ensure rates and assignments are accurate.
New to Deputy HR
As our Deputy HR customers will know, there have been a LOT of updates over the past few months! Here are just a few we’re excited to call out. If you’re interested in trying Deputy HR, you can sign up for a 30 day trial through your billing settings.
More control over sensitive document visibility
We’ve introduced new permission settings for viewing and managing sensitive information within Deputy HR, by allowing System Administrators to elect whether their Location Managers are eligible to view sensitive data and documents, or whether they should be masked.
New analytics reports, exclusive to Deputy HR
We’ve added new reports to help Deputy HR subscribers keep track of engagement, compliance and essential team data:
Kudos report: Providing the full picture on peer recognition, tracking who is sending and receiving Kudos, including the message details
Company Documents report: Making it easy to track where company documents are shared and whether team members have acknowledged them.
Team Member Payroll Details report (Australia Only): Showing up-to-date payroll details for your team, including any changes made via Employee Self Serve.
As these reports can contain sensitive information, they are only accessible by System Admins.
Upload your documents as videos
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and videos are worth even more! In HR’s Document Library, you can now upload and share and track videos (MP4s), that require acknowledgments. This means you can keep an eye on who has watched your training videos all the way to the end.
Celebrating the wins, with Kudos+
In case you’ve missed it, we’ve also introduced Kudos as a fun, new way for team members to send 1:1 peer recognition directly within Deputy Messaging. For Deputy HR subscribers, you have access to Kudos+, which comes with advanced controls and insights, allowing you to customise weekly Kudos limits in Business Settings, and access powerful AI summations and insights on the Team engagement tab. Kudos is a great way to help foster a culture of recognition, and quickly spot engagement trends across your organisation.
Multi-signature contracts made simple
Need more than one sign-off on a contract? We’ve enhanced the signed document experience in Deputy HR to handle complex workflows easily. You can now assign up to five parties to sign a contract! Enjoy automated notifications for all parties, and seamless, secure storage of the final document directly in the employee’s profile.
Simplify document management with folders
To make managing company documents easier, we’ve introduced Document Folders. Managers can now organise and access files more efficiently, ensuring important documents are easily found and managed.
And that’s a wrap! From Advanced Scheduling Filters, to Bulk Leave Imports, to faster Analytics data, we’re committed to making your complex workflows simple. Ready to put these new features to work? Log in and start exploring today! As always, we’re committed to continually improving the world of shift work, one great update at a time.
