As a global pandemic wanes on and businesses deal with the aftermath of “The Great Resignation,” one thing has been made clear: Employees are the heart of an organization. And if you want to keep your staff, you need to make them feel like it.
From simplifying communication to giving transparency into work schedules and payments, Deputy empowers individuals to manage their own work-life schedule from the palm of their hand. That’s why more than 300,000 workplaces use Deputy to streamline scheduling and simplify time and attendance.
Foundational Values
Creating a successful business means putting the people first. But it goes beyond just creating schedules and getting the employees paid. It’s not something one can do with pen and paper—or an Excel file. It’s a way of living, of running the business.
This felt even more apparent in the midst of a pandemic when nothing was certain, business plans were changing daily, and employees were required to be more flexible than ever before at work and in their home lives.
Workplaces are complex. That’s why Deputy’s mission is simple: Simplify shift work. So, the team Deputy created their values as the framework for how they live at Deputy. How they support their customers, how they make decisions, how they behave, and how they hire:
- Clock in for the customer.The customer matters. It’s why the company is passionate about showing up, with the intention to deliver value every day.
- Listen to learn.Deputy seeks diverse ideas, perspectives, and experiences because no person has all the answers. It’s how they create meaningful outcomes.
- Stronger together.The Deputy’s community succeeds with mutual respect and collaboration. Everyone has a key part to play in building the Deputy legacy.
- Lead with integrity.The people at Deputy assume good intent, stand up for what’s right, and help teammates to do the same.
- Own your shift. They take the lead and deliver what matters. They own their results, celebrate the wins, and are constantly improving.
Holistic Services at the Palm of the Hand
Deputy helps business owners and managers with all the tasks required to manage a thriving, efficient, and engaged team. That includes scheduling staff to budget, managing wage and compliance requirements, ensuring accurate payroll, and creating an amazing employee experience.
Using artificial intelligence, managers can predict how many employees they need across different roles, then schedule the right people at the right times to deliver the best service at optimal cost. On top of that, accurate, digital timesheets can verify clock-in times and integrate with leading payroll, POS, and HR systems, so staff is paid correctly and on time.
And because the company cares about the full experience—for both managers and employees—it has created an app that allows employees to swap shifts and find a replacement from the palm of their hand, so no shift is left unfilled. In fact, that’s why brands like Patagonia, Ace Hardware, and more than 300,000 businesses use Deputy to help their teams save time, get focused, and work efficiently together.
An Ardent Advocate of Workforce Management
Ashik Ahmed and his Co-founder, Steve Shelley, founded Deputy in 2008 to simplify shift work to help make every other entrepreneur successful. They decided to call the product ‘Deputy’ with the idea that it could be a second-in-charge to the business owner. Over the years, they realized the company isn’t only the second-in-charge to the business owners. Rather, it is also second in charge of the millions of hourly workers around the world.
Deputy makes their life simpler by removing clutter and mundane. Deputy lets them thrive. And the biggest difference Ashik, through Deputy, has made to business owners’ lives is that Deputy improves the lives of their team. A regular contributor to Forbes magazine, Ashik is also an expert on the subjects of workforce management, HR tech, machine learning, linear optimization, and crypto.
Ashik spent his career devoted to building technologies that create better and more efficient organizations. He believes that it is essential to focus on potential customers of a company, their pain points, and what do they care about. Hence, communicating with customers is very important for any company to understand what would make their lives better.
Technology Augmenting Capabilities
AI and Machine Learning capabilities have accelerated Deputy’s ability to create intelligent scheduling solutions that solve pain points for business owners and managers. The team uses technology to learn the patterns of behavior of workers, workplaces, and regulators in order to understand insights to deliver specific goals.
With Deputy’s auto-scheduling tools, businesses can craft the perfect schedule while reducing unnecessary wage costs with accurate labor demand forecasts.
The Pandemic Tale
Many businesses have had to scale up and down or pivot and scale quickly. This reminded the team that change and adaptability are essential parts of survival in life and business.
Ashik said, “At Deputy, we’re fortunate that we’re able to work remotely—to connect with each other through video calls, emails, and other communication tools. But we know that most of our customers and their teams were going in-person to work.”
So, Deputy pivoted its strategy to launch new tools to help businesses navigate the unexpected moments and adapt. Whether they were going into the same brick and mortar building or driving around to multiple locations, the team felt it was their duty to make their clock in and workspace as spacious as possible.
For example, the team created Touchless Clock-In to give workers a faster, more hygienic way to clock in through facial recognition. Pre-populated Pre-shift Questions help ensure employees are healthy before shifts by allowing managers to ask questions about how the staff is feeling or what their temperature is prior to clocking in. And Shift Swap allows employees to find a suitable replacement if they can’t work an assigned shift. But it doesn’t stop there. Deputy continues to adapt and change to support what the wider community needs.
Envisaging a Better Future
It’s been an exciting 13 years for team Deputy, and they will continue to invest heavily in their product and technology in 2022 to deliver best-in-class solutions for their customers. Deputy will also scale up its go-to-market functions, focusing on the US market specifically.
In 2022, the management is focused on enhancing their offerings to help supercharge the end-to-end workforce management experience – no matter the size of a customer’s business and streamline operations even further.
Appreciation of Excellence
“Our old workforce solution was limited. We had to use multiple applications to keep everything streamlined and often had to deal with data problems and crashing applications. We desired a simpler, trustworthy, all-in-one mobile solution that would work across locations.” – Hitesh Sanghvi, Masala Wok, Managing Partner.
“Deputy makes it even easier by suggesting who to reach out to for open shifts based on location and availability. My employees feel more empowered by being in charge of their schedules.”
– Ana Claudia Lopez, Olivia Macaron, Founder and Owner
“The amount of time we spent on building schedules has dropped by two-thirds. It used to be an all-day event with trying to get all the Excel sheets together and distribute the schedule. Now, it only takes me about 20 minutes! Having an integrated timesheet and scheduling feature was the biggest time saver for us.” – Bobby Heuser, Heuser ACE Hardware, Owner.
“Deputy has freed up my time tremendously! It just takes a few minutes now to undertake all my administrative tasks, and the amount of time I have saved is just mind-blowing.” – Kate Gillenwater, Optometric Care Associates, Corporate Manager.
Notable Awards and Accolades
G2 Leader Award – Workforce Management Category (2021)
G2 Most Implementable Award – Workforce Management, Time & Attendance Categories (2021)
G2 Highest User Adoption Award – Workforce Management Category – (2021)
Get App Category Leaders Award – 1st in Employee Scheduling Category (2020)
Capterra Top 20 Award – Top Workforce Management Software Providers (2020)