Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Also required | Workforce Management or Workforce Engagement Management |
| Access | Admin |
Agents swapping shifts between themselves. The cheapest piece of flexibility you can give a support team.
Set it up
- In Workforce management, click Scheduling in the sidebar and select Shift trades.
- Click Turn on shift trades and click Save.
- Tell the team it is available.
That is the whole setup, and this is what it does not include. There are no conditions to configure: no skills rule, no minimum notice, no limit on hours. And a manager's approval is required by default. Both of those move the work to the moment of approval rather than removing it.
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.
Same day and different day work differently
A same-day trade is a straight one-for-one swap: both shifts change hands and appear on the new schedules as soon as the trade is approved.
A different-day trade reads oddly the first time you see it. Once it is approved, both original shifts are removed, because each person is now covered by the other. Agent A trades the 25th with agent B's 31st, and afterwards A has no shift on the 25th and B has none on the 31st. Nothing has gone wrong; the work has moved to the other name.
Agents can follow their own requests and the outcome in their schedule, going back 30 days and a year forward.
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, and nothing checks them
Two agents can only usefully trade if both can do the work. The system does not know that, so it is the one thing the approver has to look at: not whether the hours balance, which they do by construction, but whether Thursday's queue can be handled by the person who is now on it.
Approval stands in the way, so make it fast
Every trade waits for a manager. That is the delay you cannot design away, so design around it: agree who approves, agree that it happens the same day, and treat a request sitting for a week as the failure it is. A trade approved after the shift has passed is worse than a refusal.
Pending requests are on the same Shift trades page, filterable by team or by agent, with a Closed tab holding what was approved, denied, cancelled or expired, and who decided. Expired is the one to watch: it means nobody answered in time.
Agree a notice period yourselves
There is no setting for this, so it is a team agreement rather than a rule the product enforces. A trade agreed the night before leaves nobody time to notice a problem. Two or three days is usually enough to keep it safe without making it useless, and an approver can decline the ones that arrive later.
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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