Round-robin scheduling: A complete guide to fair, balanced, and efficient scheduling

If you have a team that routinely needs coverage across weekends, holidays, and/or evenings, scheduling shifts fairly is probably one of the biggest priorities when planning.

Often, agents don’t want to always be on the night shift or always working holidays, and generally, the fairest way to assign these coverages is by using round-robin scheduling.

Keep reading to learn more about round-robin scheduling, best practices when setting it up, and tools that make it easy to adopt round-robin scheduling in your contact centre.

What is round-robin scheduling?

Round-robin scheduling is a method of allocating shifts evenly among a group of employees, ensuring every team member has an equal opportunity to handle tasks or work certain shifts and that no one is overburdened with too much work.

How does round-robin scheduling work?

Round-robin scheduling works by sequentially assigning tasks to team members so that each person gets a turn to handle tasks or shifts cyclically.

In customer support specifically, round-robin scheduling is used to distribute incoming customer requests or inquiries among a customer support team member. It prevents overload, which can lead to burnout and decreased productivity.

Benefits of a round-robin schedule

In certain scenarios, using the round-robin methodology can be a very effective way to do shift planning for a few reasons.

How does round-robin scheduling work?

Round-robin scheduling works by sequentially assigning tasks to team members so that each person gets a turn to handle tasks or shifts cyclically.

In customer support specifically, round-robin scheduling is used to distribute incoming customer requests or inquiries among a customer support team member. It prevents overload, which can lead to burnout and decreased productivity.

Benefits of a round-robin schedule

In certain scenarios, using the round-robin methodology can be a very effective way to do shift planning for a few reasons.

Fair distribution of work

With round-robin scheduling, every team member can handle tasks or requests equally. It handles requests cyclically and is considered “one of the oldest, simplest, fairest and most widely used scheduling algorithms of all time”.

It ensures that no one is left out or overloaded with work, which often leads to frustration, stress, and burnout in a contact centre. At the same time, it also distributes less desirable shifts more evenly and makes sure team members don’t feel as if they are constantly getting shafted.

Higher customer satisfaction

Customers expect a quick and efficient resolution to their problem when they reach out to customer support teams. The round-robin methodology ensures that customer requests are addressed in a timely manner, and that no customer is left waiting.

It also gives every agent an equal chance to build their skills with certain tasks or areas of the business, and can be helpful for general training and development—and ultimately uplevels not only the team’s skills, but also the customer experience overall.

Reduced burnout and improved morale

When team members are overloaded with work, they can become stressed and fatigued, leading to burnout and decreased productivity. Round-robin scheduling helps to prevent burnout by distributing work fairly and ensuring that every team member has a reasonable workload.

Potential drawbacks of round-robin scheduling

But benefits aside, there are some cases where round-robin scheduling isn’t the best option for your team.

It doesn’t work unless the team is bought in

One of the advantages of round-robin scheduling is that team members can see ahead of time if they’re assigned to a less popular shift. But this is also a disadvantage because it gives them an opportunity to make a plan to no-show. For round-robin scheduling to work effectively, the entire team has to be willing to take the odd graveyard or early-morning shift.

Shift patterns can be rigid

If you run a contact centre that requires a high level of flexibility, then round-robin scheduling—while fair—may not give you that ability to pivot or adjust schedules on the fly quickly.

It doesn’t take into account agents’ availabilities / work-life balances

Round-robin scheduling is objective and rotates shifts throughout the team predictably. Everyone gets the same shot at every task or shift available sooner or later. And while this may be fair for some teams, you may have agents who have unique needs or preferences.

For example, what if an agent is a night owl and prefers working at night because they are most productive then (or maybe they have a family member with a health condition who needs their help during the day)? Round-robin scheduling would neglect these nuances, and a more flexible type of shift pattern might be better for these scenarios.

When to use round-robin scheduling

Round robins are best when you have rotating shifts in a team, and most agents generally agree on the same shifts being desirable or undesirable.

For example, if almost everyone doesn’t want to work weekend shifts or late night shifts, then it would be most fair to rotate everyone through these shifts with round-robin scheduling.

3 round robin scheduling examples

Even though most people think of customer service teams when it comes to teams that use round-robin scheduling, they can be used for other departments too. Here are a few examples of how to use round-robin scheduling in different business areas.

1. Support

Support is, of course, the most common use case for round-robin scheduling. Many companies have 24/7 customer service coverage, and that means rotating shifts for agents. Besides time slots, there are also different support channels such as voice, social media, and web chat.

While some contact centre teams might have agents who specialise in one of these channels, others may want to nurture more versatility, and the best way to do that is to round-robin the agents so everyone is able to build their skills and master the nuances of communicating across every channel.

2. Sales

Depending on your sales territories and the size of your sales teams, you might use round-robin scheduling or a sales productivity tool to give every rep a shot to call at different times during the day. For example, if you know that pickup rates with prospects are higher in the morning and lower in the late afternoon, it would be fairer to give everyone on your outbound sales team an equal opportunity to call during more favourable times.

3. Recruiting

While recruiting may be a more niche case, large recruiting firms with outreach teams are often very similar to sales teams. Recruiters may spend most of their day reaching out to candidates and scheduling interviews (like a sales rep cold calling and booking meetings) and in a similar way, round-robin scheduling ensures that every team member gets a chance to call at different times of the day.

Types of round robin in business

To make things just a little more interesting, there are actually two slightly different approaches to round-robin scheduling. These are unique in that they’re specifically used when prospects (or customers) are booking meetings with your team (usually the sales team) instead of calling ad hoc about a troubleshooting question:

Flexible round-robin method

The flexible round-robin method, as the name suggests, gives your sales team more flexibility—typically, when a prospect books a meeting, they might be able to choose a time slot with whoever is available (regardless of whether that agent or sales rep has taken many or very few meetings already).

Strict round-robin method

On the other hand, the strict round-robin method prioritises distributing meetings equally to everyone on the team. That typically means it’ll follow the round-robin, even if it means the next agent in line isn’t available until later in the week. This would result in everyone taking the same number of calls (which is fair), but for a sales team, you might risk conversions and drop-offs from prospects who don’t want to wait to speak to someone.

How to create a round-robin schedule

Whether you’re using a spreadsheet or a tool like Dialpad WFM, creating a round-robin schedule is pretty straightforward:

Here are the key steps:

1. Define your team’s availability

Before implementing round-robin scheduling, you must determine each team member's availability—you don’t want to assign a task to an agent who’s already swamped with other responsibilities.

2. Set clear guidelines for task priority

Next, establish clear guidelines for task priority so that team members can quickly identify which tasks need to be handled first.

Make sure to define what constitutes “high-priority” tasks—for example, urgent customer issues—so that agents know to address those tasks as quickly as possible.

In Dialpad WFM, you can set up concurrent activity scheduling to have a single person responsible for two tasks simultaneously, which is particularly useful for on-call scheduling.

3. Use software with round-robin scheduling built-in

While a spreadsheet might work for a small team of two or three, it can get unwieldy if you oversee a large team of contact centre agents.

In these cases, it’s generally better to use more robust contact centre technology, like round-robin scheduling software, to help you fairly distribute shifts across team members. Diapad WFM, for example, can automate a lot of this work. There are other useful features too, like team views, which lets other team members easily see who is working a shift and when. This means if someone wants to swap their round-robin shift, they can do so easily without having to involve a manager in facilitating a shift swap.

Alternatives to round-robin scheduling

As we mentioned earlier, round-robin scheduling isn’t always the best shift pattern option and depending on your contact centre and agent availability, there might be better shift planning alternatives:

Fixed shifts

Fixed shifts are even more strict than round-robin scheduling, and in cases where you have a set work day (like Monday to Friday, 9 to 5), these would make more sense than round-robin scheduling because there aren’t undesirable shifts like graveyards.

Split shifts

Split shifts are where an agent’s workday is split up into separate smaller shifts. For example, they might work from 7am to 11am, have a break til 3pm, and then come back on until 7pm.

Casual shifts

Depending on your industry and business hours, you might also have a team of agents who are meant to plug the gap and support your core group when you’re understaffed. Instead of a set round-robin order, these groups tend to take shifts as needed.

Is round-robin scheduling right for your needs?

In certain industries, round-robin scheduling is a great fit that maintains fairness in the team and keeps employees happy and morale high.

When round-robin scheduling works well

• Even distribution of shifts and workload: Round robin gives everyone the same opportunity at desirable and undesirable shifts.

• Repetitive and uniform tasks: If the nature or difficulty of the work is the same, this helps keep round-robin scheduling fair because everyone will be taking every task and shift on at some point.

• Fair allocation for teams: Again, round robin is most fair when every agent desires the same shifts and work.

When round-robin scheduling is not ideal

• Varying task complexity: If certain tasks or shifts are more complex than others and require agents with a certain level of experience, then round-robin may hurt productivity.

• Availability issues: Though it may be rare, some agents might prefer undesirable shifts.

• Skill-specific tasks: If certain agents are better equipped to handle specific tasks, then they should be assigned to those shifts exclusively (or most of the time) to increase efficiency.

Manage workload distribution efficiently and fairly with round-robin scheduling

Whether it’s a weekend shift, morning shift, or an unpopular Friday night shift, round-robin scheduling allows you to share these working hours with your team fairly, ultimately reducing burnout and increasing morale.

Learn more about how Dialpad WFM makes it easy to set up round-robin scheduling — book a product tour now!