Shift Management: Flexibility for your Frontline
All About Digital Shift Swapping
Table of Contents
Absenteeism costs enterprises millions of dollars every year. Fully staffing locations to provide optimal customer service minimizes sales losses and productivity losses. Sounds straightforward, right?
One approach to address this staffing pitfall is to implement Workforce Management (WFM) labor planning and work schedules forecasting. There are powerful employee scheduling software tools out there to help in this regard, but even they have shortcomings. They only create the first version of your schedule. Operational realities dictate schedule changes, and you need flexible shift management to support your WFM output.
How are frontline employees swapping shifts?
Shift swapping happens because life happens. Someone calls in sick, there’s a last minute change or disruption; we’ve all been there. Your frontline employees swap shifts amongst themselves.
But without a dedicated frontline operations platform, employees have limited, non-compliant options to resolve their schedules. Do they send a quick text or try to trade shifts in a WhatsApp group or Facebook message? As soon as they do, a door opens up for someone to reveal sensitive company information in an unsecured channel.
These methods create severe blind spots for operations: there is no audit trail, no verification of labor laws, and no written record of the transaction. Alternatively, employees lean on managers to execute manual administrative fixes, or worse, they simply call out.
Yet even with rudimentary mobile tools to manage shifts, they are often restricted to a direct 1-to-1 trade. To maintain operational agility, every employee who works on the frontline requires secure, compliant methods to manage their time and achieve greater control over their work life balance.
By providing proper self-service tools, organizations minimize the loss of sales and productivity associated with understaffed locations.
Missed Shifts Lead to Reduced Paychecks
In a WorkJam–commissioned Forrester ROI study, customers said an average location manager saves two hours per week. They do this by giving frontline employees self-service shift management and time-tracking tools.
WorkJam also explored the economic impact of missing a single shift worked. Surveying 1,000 hourly employees exposed the far-reaching implications of reduced paychecks:
- Inability to pay utilities on time (49% of respondents)
- Missing rent (27% of respondents)
- Foregoing groceries for a week (25% of respondents)
WorkJam offers 5 ways to swap shifts
WorkJam’s shift swapping architecture reflects the reality of employee work. Built into the Staffing & Labor Orchestration module, WorkJam provides self-service flexibility while strictly enforcing your WFM work rules, boosting overall employee engagement.
Every employee shift management option in WorkJam ensures compliance via shift-fencing, only allowing transactions that meet your corporate rules and only displaying open shifts to employees with the correct skills and certifications.
Direct Shift Release
This ability allows a scheduled shift to be transferred directly to another qualified teammate without requiring a trade. It replaces the manual, unsanctioned text message by digitizing and automating this process into a fully auditable workflow.
Direct Shift Swap
This is the traditional 1-to-1 shift trade you execute within your WFM provider. WorkJam provides a closed-loop, compliant version of trading one specific shift for another, instantly updating the schedule without manager intervention.
Open Shift Pool Release
This feature allows an employee to broadcast the availability of their shift to the entire organization. The Open Shift Pool is a virtual picklist in the Open Shift Marketplace.
Only qualified and certified employees can see and pick those specific hours. If you mean “shift release” in a broader sense, it is an efficient way to ensure coverage. It does not target any one person.
Open Shift Pool Swap
Similar to the release, this function broadcasts a shift to the Open Shift Marketplace. It also requires a trade in return. It replicates the need for an employee to drop a specific time slot while retaining their total weekly hours.
WorkJam replicates “Can anyone take my shift? But I need the hours, so I’d like to swap shifts.”
Offer Shift
This is a direct, 1-to-1 shift offer inquiry alerting specific team members to take a shift. It is precise, targeted, and fully tracked within the WorkJam platform.
By understanding what OpenShift means and using a centralized marketplace, you ensure shift coverage. You enforce labor compliance and help your frontline reach full employment on their terms.
JCPenney uses an open shift marketplace in WorkJam to provide associates with autonomy to self-select shifts based on certifications and availability. They gave 60,000 associates flexibility, stronger connection, and financial wellness as a result.
