Available Shifts and Open Shifts for Planning

In some cases, administrators and managers need to enter open shifts - shifts in the schedule for a site but may not know when workers are yet able to be assigned to those shifts.  In another use case, available shifts that multiple workers can view and claim as their schedule permits may need to be added.  Open shifts are typically used for planning purposes as a placeholder for known work that needs to be performed but before workers have been identified.  Available shifts are typically used when the shift can be performed by the first available worker to claim the shift.

Open Shifts

Open shifts are simply shifts for work at a site that do not yet have any workers or staffing resources associated with them.  Many of our customers have asked for the ability to place these shifts on their schedules to aid in future planning.  These open shifts are displayed in the Job Calendar to provide visibility to administrators and managers who can then edit the open shift and convert to either an available shift for worker(s) to choose or an assigned shift to one or more worker.

Creating open shifts follows the same flow as creating assigned shifts.  Simply click the "Add" button, click within the calendar or drag/drop a resource (worker/site) from the left panel to launch the add modal box (see below).  Leave the worker selection blank to create an open shift for that site at the designated date/time.  These open shifts can be edited to add workers at a later time when you are ready to schedule the work and assign the shift to one or more workers.

Available Shifts

Available shifts are shifts that are available for workers to view on their Timesheet Mobile smartphone app and select to punch in/out.  In this way you can create a number of available shifts for employees to choose from a list on their smartphone app Schedule tab throughout the work day.  As soon as an available shift is either claimed by an worker, it will no longer be available for other employees to select.  Workers can explicitly claim a shift by selecting it in the Schedule tab on their app or simply punching into that shift from their app.

Let's take an example from the Timesheet Mobile Demo account.  In the example below, and administrator is creating a shift that is available to the entire Security Workgroup.  The shift is available from 4 AM to 9 AM and will be visible on the smartphone app Schedule > Available Shifts tab of all the employees in this workgroup.  In this example worker will also see the additional event information "Need someone to guard door" in the event information.

This shift will be available for administrators/managers to view in the worker/site calendars as shown below.

See below for the view that the workers will see within the smartphone app.

When an eligible worker selects the available shift and punches in, it will be removed from available shifts and no longer available to other employees to work.  An assigned shift for the worker that punched into the available shift will be created as a record.  In cases where some worker on the list are not connected to data (i.e. offline) there is no way to know whether one or more worker has taken an available shift.  The first employee punch in log that is uploaded to the server makes the shift unavailable for other workers to select from but in this situation multiple workers may be punched in on the same available shift.

Assigning Available/Open Shifts

Available/Open shifts can easily be converted into shifts specifically assigned to a worker or group of workers.  Simply edit the event by clicking the event in the Scheduling master site calendar or in the site control panel calendar.  Add or modify the workers you wish to assign the shift to, update any event info (optional) and click "Assign Shift to Selected Workers".  Click "Update" and the shift will be converted from Available/Open to assigned for those workers.