Schedule time off manually

When an agent is away, this must be entered in the schedule. Schedule time off for one or several agents manually. The time off can be for a part of the day, for the full day or for several days.

It is important to add any absences to the schedule as soon as you know about them, to make it possible to spot and act on any understaffing as early as possible.

Sometimes an absence is known far in advance, for example an already approved vacation week. Ensure to schedule this before you run the automatic scheduling. Then it is taken into consideration when the other agents are scheduled.

Sometimes agents call in sick in the morning. Add these absences directly and review the impact on the staffing situation.

Full-day absences

When you schedule a full-day absence it always covers the whole shift that is scheduled for that day. If it is entered before the scheduling, it prevents a shift from being scheduled there. An agent can only have one full-day absence per day. If a full-day absence is applied to an agent on a day which already has a full-day absence, it replaces the previously applied full-day absence. If you schedule an absence with a length that corresponds to a full day, this will be added as a full-day absence even if the Full-day absence check box is not selected.

Part-day absences

A part-day absence is scheduled for just the selected time period. An agent can have more than one part-day absence per day. The part-day absences can overlap each other. If they do, the most recently applied one is shown.

A part-day absence always belong to a specific date, and will not affect shifts on other dates.

EXAMPLE    An agent has a night shift on a Monday that ends at 7:00 AM on Tuesday, and for that shift there is an absence from 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM. This absence belongs to the Monday, even if those hours are actually on the Tuesday. If the Monday night shift is later removed, and the agent is scheduled with a shift that starts 6:00 AM on the Tuesday, that absence doesn't affect the Tuesday shift.

Prerequisites

  • You have the Schedules permission.
  • You have the Global functions > View schedules permission.
  • You have the Global functions > Modify schedules permission and the underlying Modify absence permissions.
  • You have the Global functions > View unpublished schedules permission to add absences for unpublished periods.
  • You have opened the Schedules module for the agents and period to work with.

Page location

Client > Schedules > Open schedules

Procedures

Schedule time off

  1. Select the agents and the dates to schedule the absence on.
  2. Right-click and select Add absence.
  3. Select the type of Absence to schedule.
  4. If the time off is for one or more full days, select the Full-day absence check box.
  5. Define the start and end time for the absence.
  6. Click OK.

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