UniFocus Wins TechOvation Award for Spurring Innovation in Effective Shift Coverage and Employee Schedule Flexibility With ShiftGenius

DALLAS, TX—December 16, 2021— UniFocus, the leading provider of Workforce Management Systems, has today announced its winning of this year’s TechOvation Award for the development of ShiftGenius, a powerful scheduling feature for their Labor Management and Time & Attendance partners. Selected from a list of 10 semi-finalists, UniFocus’ ShiftGenius was named hospitality’s most innovative solution thanks to its unmatched capabilities in making manager lives easier, ensuring a greater work/life balance for employees and providing employers with a competitive edge in meeting growing trends towards schedule flexibility.

Hosted by HTNG, the annual TechOvation Award is among the industry’s most prestigious and was created to recognize the contributions of solution developers in pushing technology innovation forward throughout the global hospitality industry. At this year’s awards which saw 19 companies take part, UniFocus with its ShiftGenius solution was selected by the judges as a semi-finalist and given the opportunity to present its innovation in front of a live audience at HT-NEXT. Consisting of hospitality professionals from around the world, audience members were tasked with selecting their choice for this year’s most innovative platform, with UniFocus’ ShiftGenius coming out on top by receiving the highest number of votes.

“We are thrilled and honored that our industry recognizes the immense value that ShiftGenius brings in ensuring that hoteliers can effortlessly and instantly adapt to new labor market conditions and expectations,” said Mark Heymann, CEO of UniFocus. “Today’s workers influenced by the gig economy and ongoing impact of the pandemic, are more than ever seeking out greater control over the hours they work. At the same time, managers require intuitive tools allowing them to instantly make informed scheduling decisions that take both business and employee needs into account. With ShiftGenius, hoteliers can be sure that they always meet the service expectations of their guests while leveraging the platform’s scheduling flexibility attain a reputation as the ultimate employer of choice.”

Launched in 2021, ShiftGenius serves as a standard feature for UniFocus’ Labor Management and Time & Attendance solutions. The platform is uniquely informed by an intelligent labor management system that leverages accurate, multi-variable forecasts and specific service level needs to automatically generate optimized schedules that ensure quality service. This makes UniFocus the only provider that can implement flexible scheduling options without risking service quality and significantly increasing manual admin tasks.

UniFocus is uniquely equipped to provide a feature like ShiftGenius because it is informed by an intelligent labor management system that leverages accurate, multi-variable forecasts and specific service level needs to automatically generate optimized schedules that ensure quality service. This makes UniFocus the only provider that can implement flexible scheduling options without risking service quality and significantly increasing manual admin tasks.

Building on an existing feature for finding immediate coverage when an employee is absent, ShiftGenius expands that concept to all open shifts, even before the schedule is published. ShiftGenius is smarter than a general blast – it allows managers to target whom they want to send the shift(s) to, based on their own rankings or groupings (like seniority and skills), cross-utilize within the property or across properties, all while providing visibility into availability, overtime, and other work rules. The UniFocus environment is real-time, meaning that the system won’t allow employees to pick up shifts that violate work rules and all updates are live immediately.

If they chose to do so, this feature also allows managers to send out the entire open schedule for employees to select the shifts they prefer. Managers will still approve the schedules to ensure the business needs are met. With the current demands of the workforce, this allows employees to work shifts that fit with the rest of their lives.

ShiftGenius is an additional, standard feature both in the web version and in the highly rated UniFocus mobile app.