Managing teams and schedules in your workspace

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Managing teams and schedules in your workspace

    Workforce Optimization in ServiceNow enables efficient management of teams and schedules within your workspace. It helps managers coach teams, optimize scheduling, and monitor agent demand and skills to meet customer needs effectively. Agents can manage their schedules, request time off, and coordinate shift swaps, all from a centralized platform.

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    Key Features

    • Channel Management: Monitor teams in real time, route work based on agent skills, review live performance across channels, and track pending work items.
    • Scheduling: View team calendars, assign agents to shifts, define break times, publish schedules, and approve time-off or shift swap requests.
    • Teams: Track performance trends using KPI groups, analyze team and individual agent KPIs, access agent profiles including managers and assignment groups, and identify coaching needs.
    • Coaching and Skills Assessment: Enhance agent skills through automated scoring, assessments, and coaching opportunities. Predictive Intelligence recommends skills based on resolved issues, helping to close skill gaps with targeted training.
    • Global Search: Available with the Workforce Optimization Content Pack for ITSM, allowing managers and agents to quickly search for users, groups, shifts, schedules, or tasks within the platform. Text indexing is required for searching shifts and schedules.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Improve agent performance and customer service through targeted coaching and skill development.
    • Optimize workforce scheduling to ensure better coverage and responsiveness across communication channels.
    • Gain comprehensive visibility into team performance, agent availability, and workload distribution from a unified location.
    • Streamline administrative tasks like time-off approvals and shift swaps, reducing manual overhead.
    • Leverage predictive analytics to proactively address skill gaps and training needs.

    Use Workforce Optimization to optimize your workforce and manage your teams efficiently. Coach your teams so that they gain the skills that let you address the demands from your customers. Efficiently schedule your teams to provide better coverage with integrated channel management.

    As a manager, you can monitor the demand for agents and skills in your organization to resolve issues. Assess agent skills, identify areas where they need improvement and provide training to enhance their skills set. Track your teams performance, and manage the schedule of all agents in your assignment group—all from a unified location.

    As an agent, you can manage your own schedule, access the schedule of your peers and request time off or shift swaps.

    Workforce Optimization Overview

    Get an overview of how you can set up Workforce Optimization for ITSM in this video.

    Get an overview of how managers can monitor the status of incidents and the KPIs for organizational performance in this video.

    Channel Management

    Monitor your teams in real time and jump in to help when there is a need.

    Using this application, you can also:
    • Route work to specific groups based on agent skills
    • Review real-time performance as the team is actively working on tasks across channels
    • Monitor pending work items in a queue

    Scheduling

    Access your teams' calendar to know which agents are scheduled for coverage and which agents have taken time-off.

    Using the application, you can also:
    • Assign agents to shifts
    • Define break time
    • Preview and publish team schedule
    • Approve agent time-off or shift-swap requests

    Teams

    Monitor performance trends for your teams using KPI groups. Create a set of KPIs and apply them to all groups within a team and assess team performance from one location.

    Using the application, you can also:
    • Identify all the teams you manage as well as the ones you have visibility into
    • Analyze KPIs that are crucial for your team
    • Drill into agents within each team and monitor their performance
    • Access each agent's profile to view details such as their manager, peers, and assignment groups
    • Drill down into each agent's skills or recommend them for coaching

    Coaching and Skills Assessment

    Enhance the quality of work done by your agents using Coaching. Use Predictive Intelligence to recommend skills based on issues the agents have resolved. Create coaching opportunities based on the recommendation and train the agents to acquire those skills.

    Using this application, you can also:

    • Automate the scoring, grading, and assessment of agent skills
    • Use coaching opportunities to create assessments
    • Track training assigned to agents based on their assessments
    • Analyze skill gap and recommend training

    Global Search in Workforce Optimization for ITSM

    Important:
    This feature is available with the Workforce Optimization Content Pack for ITSM (sn_wfo_itsm_cnt) from the ServiceNow Store. To enable this feature, see Workforce Optimization for ITSM Reference.
    As an agent or a manager, you can perform a search for users, groups, shifts, schedules, or tasks using the search iconSearch icon in Workforce Optimization for ITSM to easily find the information you need.
    Note:
    To search shifts and schedules, you must generate the text index for the following tables before you start performing the search for shifts and schedules:
    • Schedule [sn_shift_planning_schedule_plan]
    • Shift Plan [sn_shift_planning_shift_plan]