Take back control and prepare better with Surfboard’s new draft and publish tools.

At Surfboard, we’re passionate about improving the state of shift planning for teams around the world. Too many surfers (54% in fact) continue to receive less than one weeks notice of their shift plan, making it difficult to organise their social lives and commitments around their job. We want to change that.

Our new feature, Plans, empowers managers to be able to prepare shift schedules much further in advance and we’ve complemented that with our latest release, Draft and Publish, designed to improve communication and reduce friction by allowing managers to choose when to publish schedules with their team.

Share the schedule further in advance

In Surfboard, you have full control over which parts of the schedule to share, so you can prepare your team for whatever lies ahead.

You have the flexibility to publish different periods of the schedule, meaning you could share your back-to-school or Black Friday schedules 6 months ahead of time to give more notice to your surfers, while still choosing to publish your standard shift schedules at a frequency that works for you.

If your team work a round robin, you could publish every weekend shift for the next year, so you can get ahead of those shift swaps and any change requests that we know these shifts are prone for.

Or, if you have a rolling plan in place, you could even share your team’s schedule for the rest of 2023 with one click. Preparing has never been simpler.

Edit in peace

We know that schedules are never finished. You prepare the perfect schedule and then life happens; surfers call in sick, book extra time off, or as we saw in 2022, surprise bank holidays happen.

Making edits to a schedule that has already been shared with a team can be anxiety inducing, and involve a lot of shuffling around to cater for change requests while also achieving the right level of coverage. Having a live audience for that doesn’t help, and that’s why we’ve built draft and publish.

When anything in the schedule changes or is edited, for example by applying a plan or changing a shift from an early to a late, it’s added to the schedule in draft. Draft shifts are only visible in the Planner account – creating a safe space to make edits and collaborate with other team leads.

Then, when your team are happy to share the latest schedule, all they need to do is publish the shifts and they’ll be shared automatically with surfers and be instantly visible in their surfer account.

Have full visibility

We’ve introduced two new views to the schedule to make editing simpler.

By default, shift planners see a combination of draft and published shifts in the schedule. This means that they’ll always see the latest edits that have been made by the team. This view is shared by all planners – so team leads can collaborate together to build their perfect schedule.

If planners want to check which shifts have been shared with their surfers, the handy ‘published view’ toggle shows planners exactly what has and hasn’t been published to the team.

Keep track of changes

Making sure surfers’ schedules are up to date is a priority, but we know human errors can happen and edits can be missed. That’s why we’ve added an edit history and counter, making it easier to keep track of how many edits have been made, but not yet shared.

Share the schedule instantly with your team

When you publish your schedule, your surfers’ accounts are updated instantly, showing them the latest version of their shift schedule.

Screenshotting spreadsheets and emailing documents are a thing of the past. Just publish and let Surfboard do it for you.

See how draft & publish works with a free demo: