Tech Tip: Introduction to Shift Bidding

For public safety agencies, shift bidding is a process where employees place a “bid” to express interest in available shifts, instead of directly being assigned to them. Though some agencies offer shift bidding as part of collective bargaining agreements, others offer shift bidding to ensure equitable schedules and boost employee engagement, even without union requirements.

However, many agencies have been using pen-and-paper or spreadsheets to facilitate these complex shift bidding processes. Manual processes are prone to error—and therefore compliance risk—and can take both schedulers and members hours, if not days, of communication and manual work to complete.

Aladtec’s Shift Bidding module is designed to help organizations solve this challenge by automating their shift bidding process to award error-free and compliant long-term schedules in a fraction of the time.

How Aladtec’s Shift Bidding is different than the competition

Many solutions adopt an open-shift approach, focusing on filling individual shifts. This provides value to agencies but can miss the broader goal of shift bidding: a fair, long-term schedule that is error-free, unbiased, and CBA-compliant. Aladtec is designed to fulfill these objectives, while significantly reducing the time invested in bidding and scheduling.

To learn more or get started with Shift Bidding, get in touch. (And, if you’re indeed looking for open shift scheduling, Aladtec supports that, too!)

Step-by-step process

Step 1: Set roles – Schedulers design the shift rotations and patterns.

Step 2: Add bidding period – Schedulers initiate a bidding period by providing some key information, including but not limited to: submission period start/stop dates, award period start/stop dates, and rotations to include in the bidding process.

Step 3: Employees to submit bid priorities – Upon receiving notification of the bidding period, employees can submit the bid before the submission period closes via their phone or web version of Aladtec.

Step 4: Awarding bids – After the submission period closes, schedulers can review all submissions on a single page in Aladtec and approve the schedule with just one click.

If you have any questions regarding this or any other topic, please contact Customer Support at support@aladtec.com, give us a call at 888.749.5550 or send us an online Chat from the Help section. Happy Scheduling!