Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Also required | Workforce Management |
| Access | Admin |
Agents swapping shifts between themselves. The cheapest piece of flexibility you can give a support team.
Set it up
- Enable shift trading.
- Set whether trades need approval.
- Set the conditions: skills, hours, notice.
- Tell the team it is available.
Why it is worth enabling
Somebody needs Thursday off, a colleague would rather work Thursday than Saturday. They solve it between themselves, coverage is unchanged, and no manager spends time on it.
It also gives people control over their own week, which matters more to retention than most scheduling decisions.
Coverage protects itself
A trade swaps two people, so the shape of the schedule stays intact. That is what makes this safe to allow more freely than schedule edits.
Skills are the real constraint
Two agents can only trade if both can do the work. Where your team is genuinely uniform, trades can be automatic; where it is not, the conditions need to say so.
Approval or not
Automatic, within conditions, is better. Requiring approval for every trade reintroduces the delay you were removing, and leads end up approving what the conditions already checked.
Keep approval for trades that break a condition.
Set a notice period
A trade agreed the night before leaves no time to notice a problem. Two or three days is usually enough to keep it safe without making it useless.
Watch the pattern
One shift traded away by everybody every week is telling you something about that shift. That is worth fixing in the schedule rather than through trades.
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