How adding hours works

With self-scheduling, the agents can add their own work hours. This empowers the agents and reduces the time resource planners and team leaders spend on scheduling and making schedule changes.

The feature to add hours is available in the MyTime week view and in the day view on the mobile app. The agent clicks the pen icon on the day where they want to add hours and then adjust the duration and move the work hours to the position they want by drag and drop. It is possible to move the start and end time by 5 min intervals.

The shift that is added contains activities based on which of the agent's skills that has the lowest staffing levels compared to the forecast. One shift can contain several activities. Use the settings for maximum work time without lunch and maximum work time without short break to automatically add lunches and short breaks when the work time exceeds the defined thresholds.

NOTE Self-scheduling doesn't work if multisite skills are used. This affects agents who have a multisite skill assigned, but also agents with skills for which the staffing levels are affected by the staffing of a multisite skill.

Configuration

The following things must be set before agents can add work hours:

This feature is available to Calabrio GovSuite users.

Review the self-scheduling configuration.
Forecasts are generated for the agents' skills.
The agents must have the MyTime > Self-scheduling permission and the underlying Add hours permission.

Validations

When the agent clicks to add hours, the possible times of the day where you can add hours are shown as available. Any times where rules would be broken if the agent added hours are shown as not available, with a diagonally striped pattern. When the agent has chosen what hours to add and clicks to proceed, the validations are done again to ensure that the situation has not changed since the agent loaded the page.

All configuration related to adding hours is done on the Self-scheduling tab in the workflow control set settings. See Create rules to handle self-scheduling for more details.

Open period

Adding work hours is available for today and the next 48 days. You can configure which period to open for agents to add hours. The agents cannot add hours outside of the defined period.

Staffing levels

Set a maximum staffing threshold to ensure that agents only can add work hours when they are needed. If adding the hours would cause the staffing levels to exceed the defined threshold, the hours are not added. To ensure that agents can add hours in the situation where just a few intervals are overstaffed but most intervals are understaffed, you can allow the work hours to be added even if a certain percentage of the intervals are above the threshold.

If the staffing is above the threshold for more than the allowed percentage of intervals, a message is shown to the agent that they might not be able to add hours for the selected part of the day. The agents can still try to add the hours, but if it doesn't pass the staffing validation it will be denied.

Consecutive work hours without lunch or short break

Control for how long the agents can work without a lunch or short break.

To automatically add a lunch, use the Maximum work time without lunch setting. If an agent adds more than the maximum working time without lunch, a lunch break is automatically added to the shift. The Lunch duration setting defines the length of the added lunch break.

To automatically add short breaks, use the Maximum work time without short break setting. If an agent adds more than the maximum working time without short break, a short break is automatically added to the shift. If the agent adds several hours, more than one short break can be added.

The lunches and breaks are placed at the best possible time based on the staffing levels, within the rules for maximum work time without short break or lunch.

Maximum contract time per day

Control how many contract hours agents can work per day. Use the Maximum contract time per day setting to define the limit. A message is shown to the agent when they have reached the maximum number of hours for a day.

Contract rules

Some contract rules are validated, in addition to the rules defined in the workflow control set. The contract rule validations ensure that the nightly rest time is not broken and that the maximum weekly work time is not exceeded.

Overlapping activities and absences

The agents cannot add hours where any activities or absences are already scheduled.