Help us plan our next contest! Suggest themes and prizes!

Do you have some hidden talents you’d like to showcase?  Here at HotSchedules, we’re planning our next “My Life, My Schedule” (or whatever we decide to call it) contest and we’d love your input.   Our last contest was a huge hit and we want to make this one even better. 

We’ve kicked around several ideas, including making it a jingle contest, but were afraid that a music-only contest might be too limiting.  We still might have special awards for great song-making though - I mean, come on, we are headquartered in the Live Music Capital of the World! 

As we work on logistics, we’d love to hear your creative ideas for themes and content, as well as on the prizes that would be most appealing and motivating to you.  We’ll take any recommendations into consideration (as long as they’re on the up and up).

This is your chance to shape our next contest.  Don’t miss out on the chance to weigh in!

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New Facebook Contest Question (#6): Company Culture

Thanks to those that sent in such great photos for Question 5. For those of you who didn’t get a chance, we may run another photo contest later this year or next year, so be on the lookout for that. Congratulations to winner, Gabrielle Eggleston (of Carino's Italian in Cedar Park, Texas), who is taking home the HotSchedules prize package including 5 gift cards to a few of our customer restaurants, iTunes, and Best Buy. Check out Gabrielle's creative entry below:

"I'm sending a picture of me accessing hotschedules on my laptop...IN SPAIN! I'm studying abroad for a few weeks and this is from my residencia."

Now, it’s time to pick up the pace. We’re counting on all of you to spread the word to your friends, co-workers, and other restaurants using HotSchedules to join us on Facebook so we can reach our goal of 10,000 Facebook fans for our 10th anniversary! Check here for a reminder of the rules for our contest — in a nutshell, we are posting a new question every 2 weeks, and you can answer once on Facebook for each question. At the end of the 2 weeks, we’ll randomly select a winner from all the Facebook responses and post the next question.

With question #6, we want to talk CULTURE. Company culture is shaped by shared values, ethics and beliefs within a company that are usually influenced by individual personality of founders or the leadership team — and also by the collective personality of the company and all its employees. Many of our customers tell us that HotSchedules has become an integral part of their company culture — and we want to know what YOU think.

This one is a 2-parter, but we promise it will be very quick and easy to answer:

PART 1: Would you consider HotSchedules a positive part of your company culture?
A) Strongly agree
B) Agree
C) Neutral
D) Disagree
E) Strongly Disagree

PART 2: Why or why not?

Thanks again for your participation, and we look forward to seeing your answers! This question will be live until August 25.



HotFit 2.0 Don'tcha Know?

Health in the soil grows health in the plant.

Ray Brons recently posted on the HotSchedules blog, and I paraphrase, that employee retention is again moving to the forefront of the collective business mind. Begin by hiring the right individuals. Then retain them by showing you value them. Offer them ways to improve themselves, and their production will flourish. Provide reasonable flexibility around their daily lives and they respect your respect of them. Do all of this and then offer them a chance to achieve, to compete and to have fun, and you foster an ideal symbiotic employer/employee relationship.

Enter HotFit: a competition that HotSchedules created for its employees to boost self esteem and team confidence, build relationships between employees, and enlighten us to the fact that we work for a company that rocks(as if we didn’t already know). The first HotFit was so successful that we recently kicked off HotFit 2.0. Ultimately, this is our company giving to us and inspiring us to give back to aid in our mutual accomplishments. We both benefit, therefore we both succeed.

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HotSchedules Announces "My Life, My Schedule" Video Contest Winners!

When we asked HotSchedules users to submit videos for our first-ever video contest, "My Life, My Schedule," we weren't sure what to expect - would we get any submissions? Would they be unique? Would the decision be tough to pick a winner? Well, we were certainly blown away by the submissions that we got from some awesome HotSchedules users.

We were looking for videos that were eye-catching, entertaining, creative, and also got the message across about HotSchedules -- what's so great about it, and how it has helped people with their restaurant jobs.

Check out our brand new HotSchedulesTV YouTube channel to watch the top 3 winners and other submissions in the "My Life, My Schedule" contest!

Do you have any ideas for our next promotion or contest? Share them in the comments!