Use shift scheduling to organize your team's work

Assign shifts to your employees, see who's working in the office and remotely, and much more with the Shift scheduling feature.

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TL;DR: DeskTime shift scheduling allows managers to see the availability of their entire team in one place, assign shifts to employees (working hours and days), and keep track of who's working on-site and who works remotely. Employees can request shifts, let others know their preferred work hours, and schedule remote work days. This allows managers to keep track of their team, gives more flexibility to the employees, and simplifies accounting for hourly salaries.

How does shift scheduling work?

A screenshot of the DeskTime shift scheduling app.
Assign shifts

Let your employees know when they're supposed to work and how many hours.

A screenshot of the DeskTime shift planning app.
Shift requests

You can also let your team members request their preferred shift dates and times in the system.

A screenshot of the DeskTime shift scheduling software.
Create templates

For quicker planning and scheduling, you can create templates for shifts that repeat regularly.

Here's how DeskTime's shift scheduling can benefit your workplace

The Shift scheduling feature can be an additional powerful tool in your arsenal that helps you improve the way you work.

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Happier team

Letting your team members request their preferred shift times will make them happier and more productive in the long term.

Easier accounting

If you pay hourly wages, it's essential to schedule your employee shifts in a way that ensures fair compensation.

Effective teamwork

Organize your team's schedules, ensuring all the necessary team members to complete the tasks are at work at the right time.

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Avoid these pitfalls by using the shift scheduling feature

Over or understaffing

Organize your team's work efficiently, scheduling the right number of people at the right time.

Many separate apps

Combine time tracking with shift scheduling and keep all your relevant work data in one place.

Uneven workload

Make sure that all your employees take on their fair share of work and no one's overworked.

Don’t take our word for it

Want to hear from our users? Discover their reviews on G2.

Marc Miquel

Senior User Researcher, Enterprise

"Desktime helps me stay productive and to limit time"

"I know that at the end of the week, I want not to exceed a certain number of hours, but I also set myself some productivity % goals (time focused on certain apps / total time). I have used it for more than 7 years."
Sreejith B.

Assistant Manager, Mid-Market

"Efficient time tracking and productivity insights with DeskTime"

"I am an IT admin as well as a project lead. My job is to monitor and manage my employees, who mainly work from home. With DeskTime, we can measure their productivity, monitor their worktime activity, and evaluate their performance based on their time efficiency."
Diego Carballo

CISO, Mid-Market

"Highly efficient tool"

It allows me to see where I spend my day, find opportunities to improve my productivity, and balance my work with necessary breaks. It’s a tool that gives me clarity without being intrusive. It also allows me to control my work team and measure their level of productivity.
Portrait of Tarun, a DeskTime customer and reviewer
Tarun S.

Head of Product, Small-Business

"Amazing choice for tracking performance of employees"

DeskTime provides valuable intelligence and support for managing our distributed teams. It offers easily digestible performance metrics for our remote employees. Their competitive pricing further solidified our decision.
Portrait of Abhay, a DeskTime customer and reviewer
Abhay Singh Rana

UI/UX Designer, Mid-Market

"Perfect activity tracking"

It helps our company's hybrid culture by tracking the productivity of every employee working from home and generating weekly reports to review everyone's performance accurately. The software also helps employees focus more on their tasks without being distracted by unproductive apps or sites.
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Verified User

Computer Software, Mid-Market

"Efficient and user-friendly time tracking tool"

With its detailed reports and automatic time tracking, we can optimize workflows, improve project planning, and ensure accurate billing for client work. This has led to better productivity insights, more efficient time management, and enhanced team performance overall.
Natasha Sierra

Practice Manager, Mid-Market

"Has improved our staff's productivity"

DeskTime assists us in monitoring productivity, tracking time spent on tasks, and identifying workflow inefficiencies. It provides valuable information, which supports better team management and accountability.
Parminder Singh U.

CEO, Mid-Market

"Efficient time tracking and productivity enhancement with DeskTime"

With DeskTime’s automatic idle time and break detection features, we easily monitor the work-life balance within teams. It eliminates the need for manual reporting, leaving no room for error.
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Verified User

Computer Software, Small-Business

"One of the best tools for remote teams management and instant reporting."

I really like that it has clock-in, clock-out, and holiday management. It's easy to use, and I implemented it very fast. The support that I was offered was great!

How DeskTime works

With DeskTime, you can see your employees' arrival and departure times, analyze their productivity, schedule shifts, oversee absences, maintain a healthy work-life balance, keep track of specific projects, and more.

Step 1 to start using DeskTime: Sign up and download the desktop app
Sign Up
Create an account and download the DeskTime app.
Step 2 to start using DeskTime: Add your employee details and create teams
Add your team details
Add your employees individually or in batches and sort them into teams.
Step 3 to start using DeskTime: Start tracking time and see productivity insights
Start tracking!
Read this article on how to use our time tracking tool and communicate it to your employees.

Highly rated and globally trusted

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G2 Star rating 4.5/5 avg. (2000+ reviews)

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Frequently asked questions about shift scheduling

In very simple terms, shift scheduling is the way you organize your team's workload and assign work hours. With DeskTime, this becomes as simple as one-two-three since our app also works as a shift scheduling tool. In the “Work Schedules” section, you can add and edit shifts to employees; everyone can see when they are supposed to work and who's working at the office or remotely. You can even allow your employees to request shifts or add them to the table.
DeskTime offers an extremely easy way to schedule employee shifts with our Shift scheduling feature. To create an employee shift schedule, head to the "Work Schedules" section in the DeskTime sidebar, and there, you can add shifts, edit existing ones, see how many people will work at the office or remotely on a given day, etc. If there's a scheduled absence, it'll also show up in the Work Schedules calendar to give you a complete overview of your team.
To create a shift plan using DeskTime, go to the "Work Schedules" tab in the sidebar. You can plan your team's shifts there, see the current schedule and absences, and much more. To save some time, you can create shift templates that can be used whenever necessary, and you can also set repeat shifts – if your team members always have to work at the same time on certain days, you can schedule their hours in advance in one go.
Tracking your employees' daily shifts is effortless if you use DeskTime as your shift planning app. If an employee has been assigned a shift, you'll see the statistics for that particular shift on their user dashboard – if they arrived on time, their productivity and effectiveness during that time, and more. The Admin dashboard also shows who's late or absent, so you can easily keep up with what's happening at any given time.
Yes! Various shift scheduling apps are available on the market, so it depends on your specific needs and requirements. Since employee shift scheduling goes hand in hand with time tracking, this feature is also available on DeskTime. You can assign and plan your team's work schedules, oversee absences, and much more – all in one app, which will track your team's activities and time spent working.
If you're looking for shift scheduling software, you'll find many options with different features. You can choose between dedicated workforce management apps and tools like DeskTime, which include shift scheduling as part of its selection of features. With DeskTime, you can plan your team's workload and follow up on how work is progressing with our time tracking features.
There are some free shift planning software options available (and it's always possible to use a simple Excel sheet as well), but they are likely to be limited in what they offer. If you're looking for more advanced solutions, you'll need to look into paid apps, but the good news is that they often provide free trials during which you can test the software to see if it suits your needs. This also goes for DeskTime – all accounts are enrolled in a free 14-day trial right from the start.
Yes, in this case, you'll benefit from a time tracking app like DeskTime, which also lets you schedule shifts and plan absences. The core function of DeskTime is time tracking – you can effortlessly keep up with your team's progress. In addition to that, DeskTime also functions as software for shift scheduling with features like Shift scheduling and Absence calendar, which let you manage your workforce in the same app, saving you valuable time and resources.
Yes, it's possible to use Excel for shift scheduling, too. You'll need to create a template (or find a ready-made one) to ensure everything works smoothly. If Excel magic is not your strong suit, you can take advantage of DeskTime's shift scheduling feature, which lets you plan your team's hours in the most straightforward way possible. You'll see an overview of each week, everyone's scheduled work times, absences, and much more in one place.
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