Microsoft has recently been adding new features in its Teams service for its Shifts apps to help improve its use for frontline workers and their managers. Today, the company announced another similar improvement, but this one was created for Teams admins.
In a blog post, Microsoft revealed that Teams admins can now go into the Teams Admin Center and set up the settings in the Shifts app. Microsoft says:
This will standardize Shifts app settings across all locations, as admins will be able to uniformly set Shifts app settings, time-off reasons, and schedule groups across all frontline teams to avoid discrepancies between teams.
The Teams Admin Center will now have a new “Manage frontline experiences” option. Admins who access it will be able to toggle the Shifts settings on or off. The options will give admins the power to let frontline workers and their managers to open, swap, or offer shifts, along with the option to request any time off.
Teams admins can also add the option for managers to create schedule groups in the Shifts app. Microsoft says:
They start off by defining who will be granted the schedule owner permission across all frontline teams by creating a group on Microsoft Entra of all frontline managers. Schedule owners are managers on the ground who can create and assign shifts to their frontline workforce.
Microsoft says these new admin features for Shifts settings will free up the time that would normally be spent by the managers of frontline workers to set up and manage these settings.
A few months ago, Microsoft added some other Shifts features to Teams. That included a way for managers to see the number of their employees available to work each day on their calendars. In April, the Shifts app made some improvements for importing work schedules from Excel into the app.