Shift routines

For employees with a regular/repeating working pattern, shift routines will automatically create shifts into the future.

Amelia Andrews avatar
Written by Amelia Andrews
Updated over a week ago

Shift routines is Rotaready's way of managing employees with fixed, repeating shift patterns, like 4-on 4-off. You may have heard it referred to elsewhere as working patterns or rolling rotas.

❗️ This feature comes with an early warning! For most of our customers, shift routines isn't necessary nor recommended. It's only suited to organisations with shift patterns that rarely change, such as in the manufacturing industry.

Managing shift routines

  1. Click Settings

  2. Click Shift routines

Each routine consists of a series of working days and non-working days, in any order. 

For example, let's take a pattern where someone works 4 day shifts, followed by 2 days off, followed by 4 night shifts, followed by 2 days off. This pattern is 12 days long and is a perfect candidate for a shift routine.

To use a shift routine, you'll need to map an employee to it. You can map an infinite number of employees to a single shift routine.

✅ Using the offset feature (described below) you can have different employees mapped to the same routine, but not all in sync with each other.

⚠️ Once you've mapped an employee to a shift routine, you can no longer edit the shift routine itself, though you can edit the employee's shifts that were generated by the shift routine.

Mapping an employee to a shift routine

Mapping an employee to a shift routine causes their schedule to be populated with the shifts and non-working days of the routine, infinitely into the future.

Shifts generated from a shift routine are always published, so they're visible to the employee immediately. They can be edited at any time, but remain associated to the shift routine, which makes it easy to manipulate them in bulk by modifying the employee's shift routine mapping. 

⏰ Sometimes it takes a minute or so for a newly mapped shift routine to appear in the rota and in someone's schedule.

  1. Click Staff

  2. Find the employee

  3. Click the Shift routines tab

  4. Click Map to routine

  5. Choose the date when you'd like the shift routine to start

  6. Optionally choose an end date if you already know when you'd like the routine to stop, otherwise the routine will apply into the future indefinitely

  7. Select the shift routine you previously created

  8. The offset lets you optionally begin a custom number of days into the routine. Think of it like fast forwarding a few days into the routine - handy if you want to tessellate different employees' schedules. Entering 0 will ensure the routine begins at the start.

When the time comes around for the employee to change shift pattern, or if they leave your organisation, just return to the Shift routines tab and add an end date to the mapping.

You can only map an employee to one shift routine at any one time.

If you want to delete all the shifts assigned to an employee due to their shift routine, just click delete on their shift routine mapping.

Amending a shift routine

It's not possible to edit a shift routine if there are people mapped to it. You'll need to delete the mapping from every employee who's mapped to it first. Alternatively, you can create a new shift routine.

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