Auto-schedule shifts
Auto-scheduling in Zoho Shifts helps you quickly fill open shifts based on your staffing needs, employee availability, and schedule constraints. This article walks you through how auto-scheduling works, what you need to set up before using it, and how to run it, so you can build accurate, faster work schedules with fewer steps.
Before you start
To run auto-schedule for your open shifts, you’ll need the Administrator access level or the Publish shifts permission. You can only auto-schedule shifts for the assigned schedules.
How auto-schedule works
Auto-scheduling uses the unpublished open shifts to create a schedule. When you run it, you choose how shifts should be optimized and distributed, along with the conditions to consider. Zoho Shifts then creates a read-only draft schedule that you can review, apply, or discard.
Employees are considered eligible only if:
- They are assigned to the open shift's schedule and position.
- Shift times do not overlap with approved time off or existing assigned shifts.
- When the new shifts do not violate the schedule constraints set in their employee profile.
In addition to eligibility, you can control how shifts are assigned by setting optimization priorities, such as fair distribution, lower labor costs, employee availability, and employee schedule constraints, as explained below. Shifts are assigned to employees only when all eligibility rules and selected conditions are met.
To auto-schedule shifts
- Navigate to Schedule > Schedule Editor.
- Select a Schedule using the schedule dropdown filter for which you need to create an auto-schedule.
- Navigate to Tools and select Auto Schedule.
- In the Auto-schedule window, select Optimization Priority.
- To assign shifts fairly for every employee, select Fair distribution of scheduled hours.
- To minimize labor costs, select Low labor cost. This assigns shifts to employees with lower hourly rates first. For example, if Employee A’s labor cost is 20, Employee B’s is 30, and Employee C’s is 15, and you create an auto-schedule with 2 shifts, A and C will be assigned because they have lower costs than B.
- Select the Don’t schedule employees when unavailable checkbox to consider employee availability while scheduling. By default, this option is enabled. When you uncheck, employees may be scheduled even during time slots they’ve marked as unavailable.
- Select and enter the additional schedule constraint for the maximum number of days an employee can be scheduled repetitively.
- Click Auto-schedule.
Zoho Shifts typically takes a few minutes to generate an auto-schedule. Once it’s ready, you can view the preview from the notification bell in the top-right corner or from Tools > Auto-schedule in the Schedule Editor.
- If the preview meets your requirements, click Save Shifts to apply.
- If some shifts remain unassigned, it means no employees met the auto-scheduling conditions. You can assign those shifts manually.
To remove the auto-schedule without applying it, click Discard from the preview.
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