About Messages
Employees can receive and acknowledge company communications and reach out to other members of the transit agency using messages and memos.
Employee messages are used by transit agencies who have Sign-In Terminal or ESS (or both) and want employees to receive messages without speaking directly to a dispatcher or supervisor. With Sign-In Terminal, messages can be defined so that they print on receipts when employees sign on to or sign off from work. With ESS, messages can be sent to employee inboxes and, when required, acknowledged.
About the Inbox
Messages are shown in the ESS Inbox based on their message type (defined in the Client Shell in the OPS Employee Message Types screen).
- Personal Messages are sent to specific employees and typically
contain information about their work assignments.
Some personal messages may need to be acknowledged. After a message is acknowledged, it's moved from the Inbox to Acknowledged Messages. Personal messages may include messages automatically generated by the system. How and when these messages appear is defined in OPS Employee Message Types ancillary data.
Personal messages that are past their To Date are available to review in Archived Messages. The system automatically archives these messages.
- General Messages are bulletins sent to all employees. They're created in the OPS Bulletins screen using the General bulletin type.
- Detour Messages are bulletins sent to all employees. They contain route information changes. They're created in the OPS Bulletins screen using the Detour bulletin type.
About Messages in the Client Shell
Depending on system configuration, messages can be sent automatically for certain events. For example, when a day is activated, messages can be sent to employees with upcoming skill expiration dates (for example, driver’s license or medical approvals). Ancillary data specifies when expiration date messages are created. If you undo a day’s activation, the system deletes any employee messages generated for the day.
In Sign-In Terminal, after a message prints, the date and time that it printed appears in the message’s Printed/Acknowledged field. If a printer malfunctions when an employee signs on, Client Shell users can reprint receipts containing employee messages from the Daily Activity screen.
Messages are saved in the database, which means that Client Shell users can view messages sent to an employee. They can also change and delete them. If a message hasn't been printed, Client Shell users can delete it or update the dates, text, and the Prevent Sign-In option. Depending on permissions, Client Shell users may also be able to delete messages that have printed. Deletions are logged in the OPS Process Log.
About Employee Memos
Employee memos are a way for employees to give feedback to and ask questions of others in your transit agency from ESS. System administrators define the available recipients and memo types.
The Sent Memos page shows employees the memos they've created and any responses from the department to which they were sent.