Four ways to fill an open shift

An open shift is a shift on the roster with nobody on it. Four things can put a worker there — a manager assigns someone, a manager broadcasts it to chosen employees, an employee applies and a manager approves, or an agency officer is confirmed against a request. The four run in parallel on the same shift, so the platform guards against two of them landing at once.

What makes a shift open?

A shift with no employee on it. You get one by adding a shift and leaving the employee blank: the picker reads No employee (open shift) and the button changes from Assign Shift to Create Open Shift. The roster cell then reads Open shift.

Creating a shift that way does one more thing that is easy to miss — it also marks the shift as available for application, which is what puts it in front of employees. A shift that is merely unassigned is invisible to them until that flag is on.

What are the four ways?

Way	Who starts it	Who chooses the person	Where it starts
Direct assignment	Rota manager	Rota manager	Roster cell → Add Shift
Broadcast	Rota manager	The first recipient to accept	Roster toolbar → Broadcast
Open application	Employee	The manager who approves	Employee Available Shifts
Agency request	Rota manager	The manager who confirms a proposal	Roster cell → Request from agency...

Broadcast and Applications are both reached from the overflow menu on the roster toolbar. Neither has an entry in the main navigation.

How does assigning someone directly work?

You pick a person and the shift is theirs, with no acceptance step. The permission needed is either shift creation or employee assignment.

Two kinds of check stand in the way. An employee who is not eligible for new shifts — terminated, inactive or locked — is refused outright. So is a hard clash: an overlapping shift, or approved leave over the same dates. Softer clashes, such as breaching a 48-hour week or leaving less than 11 hours' rest, are warnings, and the two paths treat them differently. Creating a shift stops and asks you to record an override reason. Reassigning an existing shift does not stop at all — it has no override screen, so it lets warning-level clashes through and only the hard ones are refused.

Assigning somebody also closes the shift to applications, and cancels an agency request already raised against it, so internal cover supersedes the agency.

Copy Week → Next carries the employee across with the shift, so copying a filled week produces a filled week rather than a week of open shifts.

Broadcast or open application — what is the difference?

Who does the choosing, and whether anyone approves.

A broadcast is you offering one or more shifts to a list of employees you pick. Sending it marks each shift available for application, records who it went to, and sets an expiry from the organisation's broadcast timeout, which is 24 hours. The first recipient to accept is assigned there and then: no approval step, and the shift moves to Confirmed. The others can decline or let it lapse. A broadcast cannot be withdrawn once sent; it ends when somebody accepts or when it expires.

An open application runs the other way round. Any employee sees future shifts that are open for application and unassigned on their Available Shifts screen, and taps Apply for Shift. The application is refused if the shift already has somebody on it, is no longer open for applications, is past its application deadline, has already been applied for by that employee, or overlaps a shift they are already on that day. Applications land on Shift Applications as Pending, and a manager Approves or Rejects them. Approving needs the application approve or reject permission and an active subscription.

One caveat about broadcasts on the web. The employee web portal has a Shift Offers page, but nothing in the portal navigation links to it, and the notification a broadcast sends points at /employee/shifts, which is not a page. In practice a broadcast reaches its recipients through the mobile app, under More → Broadcast Offers.

What does the agency route add?

An officer instead of an employee. You raise a request from the roster cell, agencies you shared it with propose their own officers, and confirming one proposal fills the cell. That chain is covered in full on How a request becomes a rostered shift.

The part that matters here is what confirming does to the other three routes: it closes the shift to applications. The agency officer is not an employee, so the shift's employee field stays empty — closing the flag is what stops an application being approved against a slot an officer is already covering.

What stops one shift being filled twice?

Approval is the best-guarded route. It claims the shift only while the shift still has no employee and is still open for applications, both checked in the same statement. Two managers approving two applicants at the same moment therefore cannot both win: the loser's approval is turned back into a rejection reading Shift was filled by another applicant before approval completed, and the manager sees a conflict rather than a success. A manager approving against a shift that already has somebody, or that an agency confirm has closed, is refused before any of that.

Approving also tidies up behind itself: it expires the other pending applications for that shift and completes any broadcast still running on it, so its recipients stop being able to accept.

The other two directions are not symmetrical, and it is worth knowing which. Assigning someone directly, and confirming an agency proposal, both close the shift to applications — but neither ends a broadcast that is still running on it, and a broadcast acceptance writes the employee onto the shift without re-checking that it is still free. Since a broadcast cannot be withdrawn, one sent on a shift you then fill another way stays live until it expires.

What about a shift emptied by leave?

Booking someone off a shift for leave empties it, marks it available for application and records who it is covering for. The cell reads Cover Required with Off: and their name, rather than the plain Open shift, so the roster distinguishes a gap that has appeared from a gap that was planned. From there it is filled by any of the four ways above.

If the leave is later cancelled or rejected, the shift goes back to the person it was taken from automatically — but only while it is still empty and has not been handed to an agency. A shift somebody else has already taken is left alone. That restore is the booking-off being undone, not a fifth way to fill an open shift.