Concept: Hybrid Scheduling
To use this feature, you must subscribe to the Labor Optimization SKUs. If you want to purchase a SKU, contact your Customer Account Executive.
For Labor Optimization customers, Workday enables a hybrid approach to schedule generation by allowing you to combine pre-defined static scheduling shifts with dynamic labor optimization in 1 unified schedule. This approach centralizes related workers onto a single schedule, improving transparency and identifies coverage gaps across the workforce.
This feature is particularly useful for industries (such as manufacturing) that blend permanent workers who have fixed hours and repeated shift patterns every week, with casual workers who pick up leftover shifts based on demand. Leftover shifts can also be assigned to permanent workers whose skills and available hours match existing labor demands, and fall within their maximum weekly hours configuration.
To begin using hybrid scheduling, you must configure your organization’s:
- Labor demands
- Labor budget (or indicate that Workday can exceed the labor budget)
- Work schedule calendars and shift profiles for static scheduling workers
This setup enforces labor budgets and compliance rules across both static and Optimization Engine-generated shifts. When you generate a hybrid schedule, Workday generates a combined schedule where static shifts take priority. For organizations that configure labor demand settings, the Optimization Engine deducts the coverage provided by the static shifts and generates only the necessary remaining shifts to meet the demand.
Consider these behaviors when using hybrid scheduling:
Schedule Generation and Scoring
The final schedule score reflects the combined value of both static and Optimization Engine-generated shifts (see Concept: Scheduling Optimization Engine for more information about schedule scores).
Worker Thresholds and Availability
Workday adjusts a worker's maximum weekly hours, maximum working days, and minimum weekly hours to ensure static shifts are accommodated. Workers who can’t meet their minimum weekly hours due to a lack of eligible demand aren’t responsible for relaxing the overall
Minimum Weekly Hours
condition. For workers deemed unavailable for shifts, (such as those who are unqualified or available for any demand), Workday sets their assignment thresholds (such as maximum hours) to zero.Shift Aggregation and Validations
When a worker has multiple static shifts per day or static shifts that don’t adhere to minimum rest between shifts requirements, the Optimization Engine combines these into a single multi-segment shift before processing the schedule generation request. Workday supports gaps or overlaps between static shifts and aggregates them if they start on the same day or don’t respect minimum rest periods.
Multi-segment shifts display on the
Schedule Workers
report as separate shift blocks. Example: A worker with 3 segments sees 3 shift blocks.Hybrid schedule generation doesn’t modify configured static shifts to satisfy rules, such as adding missing meals. Because static shift times, breaks, and assignments are customer-configured, they might increase the number of validations triggered during schedule generation. Required breaks are automatically added to static shifts when the shifts match the criteria in your meal break rule set (see # for more information).