Manage Schedules

What is Shifts?

Shifts in Microsoft Teams is a schedule management tool that helps you create, update, and manage schedules for your team.

• Schedules – Create a schedule from scratch or import an existing one from Excel. A Shifts schedule displays days at the top while team members appear on the left. And if you’re an owner of multiple teams, toggle between different Shifts schedules to manage them.
• Day Notes – Add notes to share important news and reminders for a specific day.
• Groups – Name a group like a job function or location to keep your groups organized. Then, add people to a group.
• Shifts – Choose a slot to assign a shift. Create it from scratch, or copy from an existing one — and don’t forget to add activities like training or a specific task. Add open shifts to your schedule that anyone can request. If you need to review shift coverage, view your schedule by people or shift type.
• Requests – Review requests for time-off, shift swaps, or offers.
• Time Clock – Turn on Time Clock to let your team clock in and out of a shift with a mobile device. Enable location detection to ensure team members clock in from a designated work site.
• Share – As you edit a schedule, it’ll save automatically but your team only sees the updates when you’ve shared it out.
• Export or Copy – Look at your schedule in a spreadsheet by exporting it to excel. If you need to re-use a Shifts schedule, copy it to the date range you want.

Create a Shifts schedule

With Shifts in Microsoft Teams, you can easily create a schedule and assign shifts to your team members.

Schedules and groups

1. In Teams, select Shifts. You can:
   • Select Create a new schedule to build one from scratch.
   • Select View to work with a team’s existing schedule.
2. Select Add group to type in a name for your new group.
3. Select Add to add team members to the group. Added team members appear on the left of a Shifts schedule.

Add a shift

1. Select More options > Add shifts.
2. Add details to your shift like a theme colour, start and end time, label, breaks, or notes.
3. Select Add activity to include specific tasks, and then select Save.
4. When you’re done updating the shift, select Done > Save.

Copy a shift

1. To copy, select More options > Copy. 
2. To paste, choose an empty slot and select More options > Paste. 

Re-use a schedule

1. Select Copy schedule.
2. Choose a date range to copy from, and a date range to copy to.
3. Select details to include in your copied schedule.
4. Select Copy.
5. To undo this action, select More options > Undo copy schedule.

Create an open shift

• To copy, select More options > Add open shift.Note: If you don’t see an open shift row in your schedule, go to Settings, and select Open shifts > On.

Share your schedule

• Select Share with team.
• Choose to send your schedule to your entire team, or just affected team members.
• Select Share