If you want to make sure that your employees only get shifts on days where they can actually work, you can ask your employees to send in requests for each rota.

As soon as you have filled out your rota with empty shifts you can open the rota to requests from your employees. Simply click on “Manage requests”:

Now, this field will appear:

In this field you can just choose “Yes, open Smartplan to requests from employees”. After you have done this you have the opportunity to choose how many shifts each person should at least take. Furthermore, you can choose to send a message to your employees. Finally, you can end by clicking on “Save” or “Save and send email”:

If you choose “Save and send email” your employees will receive an email which says that they can now hand in their wishes. If you click on “Save” the employees will simply see that they can hand in requests on the page “Rotas”:

When your employees begin handing in their requests you can always keep track of who has handed them in and who has not. In this example 1 out of 14 employees have sent them:

It is entirely up to you how many requests you want to receive before you start staffing your rota. When you want to see when your employees have requested not to work you have two options.

When you click on the “copy” icon next to the name of your employee and place the mouse on a red shift you can now see if the employee has requested not to work:

Then, when you choose the staffing for the shift you can see which employees have requested not to work:

It is entirely up to you if you want to follow your employees’ requests and therefore, it is possible to give a shift to an employee even though he/she has requested not to work.

If you are unsure about how the employees hand in their requests for the rota, you can find help in our guide "How to hand in requests for a new rota".

You can also send the guide to your employees so that they can see how they should do it.