HotSchedules vs. Jolt

HotSchedules can be implemented in any organization that has to staff a store with varying hours. I have recommended this to my colleague who has 8 employees, yet he has seen great results with the shift swaps and availability tracking/time off requests. I do wish we could see some more attention to general staffing and training VS. the heavy emphasis on restaurant businesses. It feels HotSchedules has grown into many more areas and should work away from marketing so directly to restaurant businesses. Some training programs for other business would be a welcome sight.

Incentivized

Jolt has allowed us to save thousands of dollars in food by identifying issues early. This has been accomplished from both the standpoint of trend analysis and identification of catastrophic failures. Our employees have saves hundreds of hours of labor by not having to write out each individual date label used during the day.

• All the information needed for your employees can all be found in one place. From the availability of an employee to their pay rate to their phone number. It's all just a click away. Before HotSchedules all of this information was kept in different places and the managers would need to open several documents and contact lists to find what they were looking for about a single employee.
• Control over how indepth you use the product. The possibilities of this service are seemingly endless. However if you are solely looking for a specific feature HotSchedules offers you have the ability to soley use that feature. HotSchedules can simply schedule, or it can automatically schedule, or you can assign a specific job to a specific person on a specific day. For us, we have employees who are doing a specific job/task one week and then they are needed for a different job/task the next week. HotSchedules allowed us to narrow down our options starting with department, moving to location, moving down to the job they would be preforming for that scheduled day.
• The ease of changing/releasing shifts. If an employee wants more hours they can go in and select shifts that are up for grabs or request to work on a specific day at a specific time. The opposite is also true. If an employee is worried they will have too many hours that week, they can release their shift and put it up for grabs by a different employee. And of course, all of this is fairly customizable to what you want your employees to have the ability to do, with or without your intervention and approval. In our case, if a shift lead releases a shift we only want other shift leads to be able to pick up the shift. HotSchedules allows us to do just that.

Incentivized

• Timely reminders of when checklists need to be executed; The team is alerted audibly and visually when checklists are coming due or when they are past due.
• Customized text message confirmations when audits are completed/incomplete; This feedback closes the loop with the Management Team confirming the status of the required daily checklists/audits.
• Documented proof of completion through photos; Checklist questions/items can be setup to require photos to be taken as visual evidence that a task was completed. This adds a check-and-balance feature that deters pencil whipping tasks and eases the burden on the Management Team when it comes to auditing compliance and driving accountability.
• Remote printing from any device setup with Jolt; We have iPads throughout the restaurant communicating real-time information with various functions within the store. It is very convenient when a Team Member in one department can print on the device in front of them, while calling out to another Team Member to retrieve labels from the printer when on their way to assist with a job function.

• I find that the system of assigning jobs and rates is a little tedious, but understand the need for it.
• I'm not familiar enough with the copy and setting the next week's schedule, but it's not necessarily hard to use.
• The whole assigning welcome letter and with log in and password is difficult with the Spanish speakers even though you have a Spanish version.
• Many of our employees do not have email or smart phones, so I find that HotSchedules is not as useful to them or us.

Incentivized

• Development Sprints: They are always improving, but the speed to the deployment of features could be faster.
• Customization: The Dashboard is solid, but being able to brand the back end to look more like my company would help me gain buy-in from all department heads and help integrate Jolt further into the company.

Ease of use, efficiently creating and posting staff schedules.

Incentivized

Jolt is very user friendly and offers a lot of solutions to my companies needs. If it offered a Payroll piece and a Point of Sale piece it would make it a complete system that would solve 99% of my companies needs.

6 Years of Experience provides me the insight on the upgrades and changes that HotSchedules has done to improve the experience of its users. There are so many features that we still have not started or used to the fullest, but we believe that we are currently getting a strong value out of the money that is paid for this product.

Incentivized

The system itself is very user friendly and every one of our team members is able to use it easily. The only difficulty that we have occasionally run into is a lack of connectivity between the Bluetooth printer and the iPAD. There are only two or three of us on staff that are well versed enough with the product to be able to fix it when there is this kind of issue.

Always cheerful, informative, and educated staff. Each person seems to want to find a way to help us with any issues or questions we have. I love that all the staff is friendly and in a good mood when you call, I have never had a rep be unhelpful or short tempered, or ever less than accommodating to our needs!

Incentivized

When I have had questions or needed technical support, I have received a very prompt response to my emails. The answers are concise and if there are instructions they are easy to follow and implement. All interactions I have had with the Jolt team have been a very positive experience.

Jolt is user-friendly and was an easy implementation. Held a couple of training classes for our management on how to use the product.

HotSchedules was the first to tie into a POS to control clocking in and out for employees compared to a canned product from major POS providers. HotSchedules is more widely used by hourly employees in the industry, so there is less of a training curve.

Incentivized

Before this, we used Namely for our training and Paper for Cleaning Lists. Moving to digital was difficult at first but has been well worth the effort put in the beginning. With our other system, there was no one to reach out to for help. Any time I have a question, our Jolt Representative will hop on a call and assist us in fixing the issue, or just to talk through how we can improve what we already have!

• Saving time on scheduling means our managers can focus more on guest experience, managing the floor and other areas that contribute to the success of our business.

Incentivized

• Increased accountability and cohesiveness of how all staff members are expected to clean our facility has allowed our facility to decrease the number of respiratory illness and communicable diseases that are passed around our dog pack. We feel this is a direct result of everyone being required to do jobs to the same cleaning standards and or ability to track when employees are not meeting that standard.
• Barcode scanning has increased our ability to trust employees are getting the jobs done independently thus reducing the need for continual management oversight. We've been able to reduce the number of hours our managers work, allowing them to trust the staff more and utilize Jolt reporting to identify poor performance and spend their time addressing concerns and re-training verses just babysitting the staff on shift.

Incentivized