Shift requests
Shift requests are a way of rostering in which a business publishes the shifts or positions available for an upcoming period and staff request the ones they want to work, instead of a manager assigning shifts to people directly.
How it works
A typical cycle has three stages:
- Publish. The business lists the work for the period: which days or nights, which roles or locations, and how many people each one needs.
- Request. Staff look through the list and submit their preferences, usually within a set window and often limited to a minimum and maximum number of shifts per period.
- Allocate. A manager checks the requests against the available capacity and decides who goes where, usually weighing seniority, past reliability, or plain first-come order.
Requests can be taken by phone, in a spreadsheet, in a group chat, or (as in Chronomancer) through a signed link sent to each person for the current period, with no app or login.
What changes for staff
Shift requests change the first question from "who do we assign?" to "who wants this?". For businesses with a casual or contractor workforce, that tends to reduce no-shows and late refusals, because people are working shifts they chose. Staff also see what's on offer before they commit, instead of learning their roster after the fact.
The catch is that popular shifts draw more requests than there's room for, and unpopular ones may draw none. That's where a standby pool and clear allocation rules (see bid-based rostering) stop being optional.
In Chronomancer
Shift requests are Chronomancer's core mechanism. Staff request work through a unique signed link each period, and each request is tracked against named positions with set capacities, so allocation is based on the demand people expressed rather than on guesswork.