Shifts

 A shift is an organized time table, created to evenly distribute workloads across the team, and ensure there are enough members available during all shifts.

Shift generally refers to any work schedule that are outside standard office timings. Shift work can include evening, night, and early morning shifts, as well as fixed or rotating schedules

Example: A customer support team who works six weeks of day shifts, followed by six weeks of night shifts.

Add Shift

Click on the dots to create a shift, and click on Add Shift.

To create a new shift fill in the details like Name, Shift Type, Shift Start Date, Shift End Date, and Select Contacts.

Name: The user can enter the shift name

Shift Type: Select the Shift Type as On call or Normal.

Shift Start Date: Select the start Date and Time of the Shift.

Shift End Date: Select the end Date and Time of the Shift.

Shift Colour: Select the Shift Colour code.

Reoccur: Select the Reoccur checkbox option for any preferred cycle of reoccurrence like Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Yearly with the end date for the cycle.

Select Contacts: Select the primary, secondary and escalation point of contacts for the shift. The purpose of selecting multiple contacts is when the primary is not avaialble to respond an Incident then the alert will be automatically sent to the Secondary Contact and if that fails then it is sent to the Escalation Contact.

Scheduled Calendars :

Users can view  Scheduled Calendars as Weekly, Monthly, and Daily.

Month: Click on “Month”, total month schedule will display in the calendar.

Week: click on “Week” total week schedule will display in the calendar week-wise. 

Day: click on Day, and the day Schedule will display.

List Calendar and Shifts: Click on List to view the list of created Calendars with Calendar Name, Number of Shifts, Number of Contacts, Creator Name, Created Date, and dropdown for Edit and Delete Actions.

Click Shifts for any calendar and user can view the shifts for that specific calendar with Shift Name, Shift Type, Shift Start Date, Shift End Date, Number of Contacts, Creator Name, Created Date and the dropdown for Edit and Delete actions.

Edit Shift: To Edit Shift Details, Click on the “ Actions “ dropdown against that specific shift and click on “Edit”.

Delete:  To Delete Shift Details, Click on the “ Actions “ dropdown against that specific shift and click on “Delete”.

On Call Scheduling Terminology

On Call Schedule: An on-call schedule (or on-call shift) is a schedule that ensures the right person is always available, day or night, to quickly respond to incidents and outages. Example: In hospitals, on-call doctors are assigned to attend medical emergencies during their shift.

A bi-weekly on-call schedule lets employees rotate on-call duties every alternate week. For example, a group of helpdesk employees is on call for first week, take off the second week, then resume on call the third week.

Work Shift: Work Shift generally refers to any work schedule that are outside standard office timings. Shift work can include evening, night, and early morning shifts, as well as fixed or rotating schedules.

Staff Calendar: It’s simply the dates and times when a person is supposed to work. On the type of work , the holidays, or the laws of the region there are different types of work schedules. A team calendar is a synced calendar that coworkers have access to. Businesses commonly use these team calendars to keep track of schedule, time-off dates, task and deadlines, and anything else that’s important for the entire team to know.

Overview

Managing calendars and scheduling your meetings is made simple by Zsuite and is explained in this module. Here the administrator can also do the staff scheduling and assign shifts to the members of the organization.

On Call and Scheduling are the very important aspects and have to work on different tools and sheets to maintain the scheduling and appointments for the production teams and high risk teams. Zsuite combines all features so that it’s easy to have all at one place.

The benefits with the On Call Calendars and Staff Scheduling :

– Reduce different tools and sheets to check and monitor

– Check the Calendars of the peers or superiors who are on call that moment for any meeting

– Communicating to the exact person attending the support during the time of any incidents.

 – Sending message to only the person in charge that moment instead of sending to all would save time and money

Who can access these features?

Administrators and Staff Schedulers have the access to staff scheduling part of the application and rest of the members can work on their calendars at individual level

Staff Scheduling Calendar

Staff scheduling is an important element for optimal planning of organization staff to deploy the required experience, knowledge, skills in the right place at the right time to achieve business objectives.

Some of the key factors of an On Call Staff Scheduling are identifying Users who will be on-call, shift types like daily, weekly, fortnightly, etc., and start date and time for the schedule.

Automated staff scheduling helps in deploying backup for primary critical employee, tracking and distributing the work schedule / hours, keeping track of time-off and communicating with employees.

Click on the “Staff Scheduling” from the left menu options.

Staff Scheduling  Calendar Creation:

Staff Scheduling Calender can be created by clicking on the “+” icon on the top right.

On “Staff Scheduling”, the user needs to fill in the calendar name and select the appropriate contact group.

Name: The user can enter the calendar name.

Groups: The user needs to select the group from the dropdown

Please select the checkbox option to mark if it is an IT calendar.

Search Calendar: Search the calendar name in the search bar.

Select Calendar: Select the required calendar to reflect for reference.

Edit Calendar

Click on the “Actions” dropdown and click on “Edit”. 

Users can also edit calendars by clicking on List>Calendar>Actions>Edit.

Delete Calendar

Click on “Delete Calendar” to delete the calendar.

Users can also delete calendars by clicking on List>Calendars>Actions>Delete.

Calendar view 

Users can view a calendar here.

By clicking on the “< “ icon  user can see the previous month’s calendar and click on “>” to see the next month’s calendar

On Call Scheduling Overview

Managing staff calendars and scheduling meetings is made simple by Z suite. Staff Schedule is an employee schedule or calendar for a specific time with employee names and their shift times. Organizations use these schedules to assign hours to each of their employees and give everyone a reference for shift times.

The staff schedule plays a vital role in evaluating staffing levels and availability, assign staff who can work extra shifts during incidents, follow local rules and regulations, and publish schedule early. The Staff Schedule has Calendar and within Calendars it can contain various Shifts. Calendar can be created for both Non-IT and IT Events and Shifts can be created for both Normal and On Call.

Calendar and shifts help to distribute load among the team appropriately to monitor and manage incidents efficiently and extend 24 X 7 support to various geographies of an organization.