What is Day.io's Shift Management?

Shift Management is Day.io’s solution for planning, organizing and communicating employees’ work schedules.

It lets managers create, view and publish schedules easily, ensuring legal compliance, reducing manual errors and increasing efficiency.

The tool provides greater visibility into who is scheduled, who is absent and how workloads are distributed.

Key benefits

1. Optimised planning – reduces reliance on spreadsheets and speeds up shift allocation.
2. Guaranteed compliance – helps ensure schedules respect legal and contractual rules.
3. Fewer mistakes and rework – automates calculations and shift distribution.
4. Efficient communication – notifies employees when schedules are published.
5. Agility during unforeseen events – enables last‑minute adjustments with minimal clicks.

What you can do in Shift Management

1. Create planning spaces
   • Set up different planning spaces linked to company locations, each with its own configurations, areas and operating hours.
     
     
2. Define Areas
   • Organise shifts by roles, functions or departments. Assign a primary area to each employee to simplify shift creation and prevent errors.
     
     
3. Shift Templates
   • Create Templates to reuse structures planned in previous weeks. Templates can be applied to new weeks or replicated across multiple periods.
     
     
4. Absence management
   • View and manage absences directly in the shifts tab, whether requested by employees, created by a manager or added during shift creation.
   • Pending absences are flagged and can be approved by authorized managers.
     
     
5. Publish schedules
   • After reviewing, publish the schedule to notify employees by email or mobile app. Changes made after publication require republishing.
     
     
6. Alerts
   • The system detects potential violations before publication, alerting you to excess hours, insufficient breaks or shifts on holidays.
     
     
7. Print schedules
   • Export or print complete or individual schedules for offline reference.
     
     

Tips or troubleshooting

• Configure alerts to be notified of possible violations before publishing.
• Use schedule templates to reduce planning time and standardise shifts.
• Adjust permissions based on roles (manager, scheduler, employee) to ensure everyone sees and edits only what they need.

Best practices

• Review schedules and alerts before publishing to ensure legal compliance.
• Inform employees of updates after republishing to avoid communication gaps.
• Keep employee, area and planning space records up to date to prevent allocation errors.

Frequently asked questions

1. What’s the difference between a planning space and an area?
   A planning space divides schedules by location or branch, while an area groups employees by function or department within that space.
2. Do I need to publish every time I make changes?
   Yes. Any alteration after publication requires you to republish the schedule so employees receive the updated version.
3. What happens to shifts that violate legal rules?
   The system shows alerts for excess hours, insufficient breaks or scheduling on holidays. Make corrections before publishing.
4. Can I duplicate a schedule from one week to another?
   Yes. Use templates or copy previous weeks to replicate the same structure in a new period.