Royal North Shore ED will be implementing HosPortal's preference-based self-roster in their department. This means you express preferences for days and the software will try to match you to shifts of your preference.
In general, it's ideal to express many shifts, since the more shifts you choose, the more you are likely to get that match your preferences. It's actually better to think of preferencing ALL the shifts and remove preferences for shifts you prefer not to do.
Example: Let's say you don't like working Mondays, and you prefer not to work evening shifts on Fridays - in that case you select all shifts, then delete preferences on all Mondays, and all evening shifts on all Fridays. If you do this, its quite unlikely you will get any shifts matching the days you un-preferenced (but not impossible)
When selecting your shifts
You will see the Self-roster window in the Dashboard when the window for preference selection has launched. You can view the selection window, but you cannot make preferences until the window is open. You need to click on the button 'Click to selfroster' to get started.
Selecting your preferred shifts
Click on Select All to choose all the shifts - THIS IS IMPORTANT
Deselect the shifts that you do not prefer by clicking on them. You can also deselect the entire day by clicking on the check mark beside the date.
You will notice that the calendar will change its colour from green to yellow when everything has been selected. The selected yellow shifts will turn back to green when deselected.
You can express preferences regardless of the number of other people who have also chosen their preferences. You can see the number of people - including yourself - by the number in each shift.
You can make changes to your selections as long as the self-roster window is still open by selecting and deselecting the shifts.
When you are done, it is ideal if a large number of shifts are yellow (that is, preferenced). At least 60% or so.
Selecting blockouts
The self-roster allows you to select blockouts - these are shifts you will not be assigned by the software, but it is possible an administrator may make an executive override decision. The toggle allows you to switch between selecting/deselecting preferences and selecting/deselecting block-outs using the 'Manage blockouts' toggle. Blockouts are shown in navy blue.
Toggle the 'Manage Blockouts'
Select the blockout shifts by clicking on them.
Notice that the blockout counter changes its number when selecting and deselecting the blockout shifts.
Since each "shift" you can see may represent more than one shift on the roster your blockout count may go up by more than 1 when you blockout a shift.
Confirmation of your selections
A roster administrator will review all users' selections before finalising the roster. Depending on the rostering rules and the selections made by others there is no guarantee that you will get any or all of your selections. There is also no guarantee that you will never be assigned a block-out shift by your administrator.
The timing to publish the final roster is up to the roster administrator.
Once the roster is finalised you will receive notification of the shifts you have been assigned.