Scheduling Days Off with Flex Schedules

[Shawn Livengood]

Hi everyone.

I am wondering how you let CSRs schedule days off in a flexible scheduling environment.

Currently, we allow our CSRs to request time off up to 6 months in advance, and record it in our WFM software. However, since our schedules are only created every 2 weeks at a time and the days off can change with each run, if a CSR requests off a week, we have to record them off for the week, even though they'll only be working 4-5 days. Which in turn makes us deny other CSRs time off until we generate schedules for that week.

Our WFM vendor recommends using the preference based assignment feature of our software, but because of limitations of the software and time needed to maintain the preferences, that is not feasible.

Has anyone else ran into this issue? If so, how did you resolve it?

Thanks!

[Connie]

When our CSR's request time off some may or may not work a Flexible Work Arrangement. We do not use a software program to do our phone schedules and we perform the task daily. This allows for flexibilty in the areas of training, project management and personal time off etc. We use a shared Outlook (email calendar) that the analyst goes to and request the certain time frame off of the phone and this generally works well. Of course we have our peak times and do not allow our shedule to fall below 7 analyst logged in at any given time. We also do not allow more than two analyst and one service lead off in one day. Note: We have a total of 21 analyst and 3 Service Leads for the HR-Operations. I would be happy to talk more with you because we do have some part-time analyst that work 10-2 or 3-7. Hope this information helps. :)