‘We Pride Ourselves on Being One of the Most Integrated, Easy to Use, Scheduling Apps Available. It’s PainFreeTM Employee Scheduling and our Clients Love It!’: Adam Greenberg, President and CEO of MakeShift

“MakeShift was designed to empower managers and employees to manage their schedules with ease.”

With clients like Air France, Hyatt, Best Western, Alberta Health Services, and La Senza among others, MakeShift is the go-to employee scheduling and time management app for companies looking to save time, increase employee engagement, and drive growth. MakeShift lets managers build schedules faster, track time & attendance more accurately and communicate with employees in real-time.

As a cloud-based mobile solution, MakeShift is available to teams across North America and the World. And to that end, the teams that use MakeShift praise its ability to give them time back to focus on the work that matters to them ultimately creating happier employees and leading to a healthier bottom line.

To learn more about MakeShift and the secret to its success in this space, I sat down with Adam Greenberg (president), who serves as the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Below is an excerpt.

Head to Head with Adam Greenberg, President & CEO

Q. From your perspective, how is the industry you serve currently evolving? And what are the trends in the different categories?

From my perspective the industries we serve are evolving in several ways but let’s focus on two: First, the Employee Experience, second, the Customer Experience. From an employee experience perspective, when I think about how organizations in healthcare, retail, hospitality, and sports/recreation attract and retain the talent their evolution is to offer more flexibility. These employers recognize that their staff want to make scheduling decisions from their handheld device, anywhere and at any time. They are learning to accommodate the need to let employees set their availability, swap shifts, bid on open shifts, and communicate with managers and peers when their schedules suddenly change. That’s a major ‘shift’ (pun intended) and employers who promote schedule flexibility are attracting and retaining the best talent which has a direct impact on profitability and an improved customer experience. That’s a good segue to the customer experience. The connection between happy employees and happy customers has never been more obvious. The labor shortage that was brought on by the pandemic saw many businesses in retail having to limit their store hours. We saw restaurants only offering take-out because they couldn’t find staff to serve customers and we saw customers having poor experiences and staying home as a result leading to more and more bankruptcies. It’s a vicious cycle and while the pandemic can shoulder some of the blame, the need to attract and retain employees has never been greater. We are proudly at the forefront of solving this challenge.

“Employers who promote schedule flexibility are attracting and retaining the best talent which has a direct impact on profitability and an improved customer experience.”

Q. Where does MakeShift stand at the moment relative to the industry standards?

In terms of the SaaS industry, we measure ourselves from two key points of view. We take an outside-in point of view and measure ourselves on third-party metrics like net promoter score, compliance, security, and governance. And, we take an inside-out point of view and measure ourselves on employee engagement, revenue growth, EBITDA, and user churn. We do really well in some areas and have an opportunity to improve in others, and that’s important because one of our core values is Kaizen, which is a Japanese word for constant improvement. We are always looking at ourselves critically from an outside-in and inside-out viewpoint and implementing ways to constantly improve.

Q. How does MakeShift streamline team scheduling for managers?

MakeShift was designed to empower managers and employees to manage their schedules with ease. We wanted the process to be entirely pain-free, so we focused on creating a solution that puts people and their experiences first.

With MakeShift, managers can create more effective schedules in less time by accounting for employee availability, time off, projected budgets, and overtime costs. Managers have full visibility on when their staff are working, late, on break, or have missed a shift and can quickly make shift changes through the mobile or web app.

Whereas employees use MakeShift to request time off, set preferences for when they would like to work, swap shifts with their coworkers, and bid on open shifts. This means less time spent by managers following up with their staff and continuously making one-off changes to the schedule.

We also integrate with the top HR and payroll providers to further streamline scheduling. All of this stacks together to give managers and employees time back in their day to focus on other matters or find that work/life balance we all seek.

Q. What are your other focus areas?

We do have a few other focus areas. The most important might be how we constantly work to improve the employee user experience as well as time tracking. We are always looking for ways to prove our #PeopleFirst mantra. For example, we are super proud of our innovation around setting fatigue rules so that employees aren’t over-scheduled. We are also proud of the work we did to help managers and employees cope with the ever-changing rules and privacy concerns related to office occupancy, testing, and vaccination status as a result of Covid-19. Finally, we invest in our integrations and APIs, so our customers have a choice when it comes to the other apps that need to exchange information with MakeShift. We pride ourselves on being the most integrated, PainFree^TM scheduling app available.

Q. No doubt Makeshift is charting new territories in this segment. Given how frequently circumstances change, what plans for transformation are you pursuing to remain relevant now and in the future?

MakeShift started back in 2014 and we were the first company to offer a #PeopleFirst solution to scheduling. The market is hot right now with a lot of new players showing up. We welcome the competition as it pushes us to be even better. We are making major investments in our product to modernize our technology platform to allow us to add new features rapidly to meet shifting customer demand within the different industries we serve. We are redesigning our mobile apps to be faster and more intuitive and enhancing our integration capabilities so that we can integrate more easily with third-party providers, whether that’s a point-of-sale system for a restaurant, an HR and Payroll platform, a provider of earned wage access or a different accounting system. Things move very quickly in the employee scheduling software space and to stay relevant you need to think three steps ahead.

Adam Greenberg | President & CEO

Adam Greenberg is President and CEO of MakeShift.

With over 25 years of executive management experience with some of the world’s largest software companies, including Ceridian and SAP, Adam’s professional success is rooted in a personal commitment to excellence and his desire to help businesses grow by creating cultures of purpose where employees feel fulfilled.

Adam is also deeply passionate about and committed to humanitarian initiatives. He is the founder and President and CEO of leaders2give.org a US 501© (3) non-profit and the founder and President of Leaders2Inspire, an organization that specializes in corporate retreats focused on building high performing teams.

As a family man, Adam enjoys spending time creating memorable adventures with his wife Tracey, and daughter Eliana. Whether paddling down the Sea of Cortez while at his winter home in Baja California Sur, Mexico, the Pacific Ocean during the summer on the Sunshine Coast, British Columbia, or helping people explore the diverse wine regions from around the world at his Wine and Tequila bar in Mexico as a trained level-2 Wine Sommelier, Adam believes in finding balance and experiencing life to its fullest every single day.

 “We are redesigning our mobile apps to be faster and more intuitive and enhancing our integration capabilities so that we can integrate more easily with third-party providers, whether that’s a point-of-sale system for a restaurant, an HR and Payroll platform, a provider of earned wage access or a different accounting system.”