Scheduling shifts is tedious and time-consuming. As a manager or dispatcher, you have to consider all the shifts or jobs you have, your employees' availability, qualifications, your country's regulations, and even more. If you are tired of that then the auto-assign shifts capability is for you. Sit back, let us do the heavy lifting, and watch as the magic happens. We will create the schedule for you with just the click of a button.
In this article we will go over the following:
What Does Auto Assign Take Into Consideration?
Auto-assigning shifts may seem too good to be true, but rest assured it isn't. Even if your employees have certain unavailability or your shift requires certain qualifications, Connecteam considers that. When using the auto-assign capability the following is taken into consideration when building the schedule:
Overlapping shifts - Nobody will be assigned two shifts at the same time by accident
Approved Time Off Requests - if using the time off feature employee won't be assigned on approved days off.
Users Unavailability - if users marked unavailability it will be considered
Shift Qualification - if certain shifts require qualification or certain jobs, we will make sure only a qualified user gets those shifts.
Shift Coverage - Trying to assign the maximum number of unassigned shifts. We strive to assign 100% of your shifts.
Fairness - We strive to give an equal number of shifts per employee
💡Tip: We are constantly developing this capability. Next up we will be considering your schedule limitations, your employee's work preferences, similarity to your previous schedule, and pending requests for open shifts.
How To Automatically Assign Shifts?
Now that we know what the auto-assign takes into consideration let's go ahead and use it. To get started you need to already have shifts in the schedule.
Step 1: Preparing Your Shifts
Whether you add shifts one by one, drag and drop shifts from your templates library, or important them you need to have shifts added to the schedule and unassigned to employees to use the auto assign capability. Unassigned shifts will appear at the top of the schedule. You can see how this looks in the example below.
Step 2: Automatically Assigning Shifts
Once, your shifts are prepared and ready to be distributed simply click on the marker icon next to the unassigned shifts.
Select Confirm and watch as all your shifts are distributed between your employees its as simple as that. Note that all shifts are assigned as drafts meaning
Note that you can adjust what is taken into consideration. If you do want shift qualification or employee unavailability to be taken into consideration at a lower priority be sure to toggle these off before selecting confirm and auto-assigning the shifts.
Frequently Asked Questions
After using the Auto Assign Im got the message that X shifts weren't assigned. What does this mean?
If you see the following error it means that there were some shifts that connecteam was not able to fit into the current schedule they suggested. In this case, the shifts will remain in the unassigned section of the schedule. If you still need to distribute these shifts you can do so manually.
Can I schedule part of my shifts and auto-assign the rest?
Absolutely! Start by assigning the shifts you would like to assign yourself then go ahead and use the auto-assign capability.
I don't like the distribution of shifts is there a way to redo them?
At the moment, the only way to do that would be to use our multi-select capability. Select all your shifts, unassign them, and then reassign them again using the auto-assign capability. Take a look at how this looks below.
Need more guidance? 🙋 Our LIVE support team (at the bottom right corner of your screen) replies to ANY question.