For organisations impacted by labour shortages, employers may look to hire agency staff or other types of non-permanent staff to cover shifts due to the increased labour needs.

Workforce's 'Agency Staff' feature allows you to manage agency staff directly within Workforce, as well as other types of staff such as:

'Agency Staff' is a paid feature that's based on the number of active agency employees per month. You can see the price within your account by going to Feature Management > Agency Staff > Enable (a pop-up modal with pricing will be shown before enabling):

Agency Staff have similar permissions and access within Workforce as an employee. Therefore, Agency Staff can perform functions critical to their role, such as:

Agency Staff cannot perform certain functions in Workforce that a permanent employee can. The restrictions for Agency Staff are:

To enable* 'Agency Staff' for your organisation, navigate to Settings > Feature Management > Enable 'Agency Staff':

Once enabled, managers will be able to allocate on a per-employee-level staff who are Agency Staff for your organisation.

*You must have an "Admin" permission or access to your organisation's settings to be able to enable 'Agency Staff'.

Once the 'Agency Staff' feature is enabled, managers can select staff within their Staff List to set specific staff as 'Agency Staff'.

To do so, enter an individual staff profile via Workforce > Staff. If the agency staff doesn't yes exist within Workforce, you will first need to create a new staff profile via the + Add Staff.

On the staff profile, a new option for 'Agency Staff' will now be visible on the Personal tab:

When 'Agency Staff' is enabled on an employee level, a blue banner will display on their profile to indicate that the employee is Agency Staff:

An indicator will be displayed in several areas of Workforce to help management teams identify which staff are agency staff within their Organisation. Agency Staff can be recognised by the 'clock' icon, as seen in the examples below:

Employee Profile:

Staff Index Page:

Timesheet Index Page:

Schedule/Rota + Shift Card:

Once the 'Agency Staff' feature has been enabled and one or more agency staff have been added to your organisation, a staff filter will apply to several key areas of Workforce to help management teams filter out 'Agency Staff' and 'Permanent Staff', as seen in the examples below:

Staff Page:

Timesheets Page:

Rota Side Panel:

Note - you must be viewing the location/team which the Agency Staff is assigned to.

Cost Report by Employee:

When Agency Staff is no longer needed, a profile can be deactivated the same way as a permanent employee. Enter the staff profile and click Deactivate located in the bottom right of their profile:

Alternatively, admins can turn on “Automatically Deactivate Unused Agency Staff” from Notifications & Tasks → Scheduled Tasks, which will check and deactivate eligible agency staff* at local time 11 pm every night.

*agency staff that have not worked a shift for a month, and do not have future shifts

If Agency Staff are no longer required, the 'Agency Staff' feature can be disabled by navigating to Settings > Feature Management > Disable Agency Staff.

Please note, to disable the 'Agency Staff' feature, all existing Agency Staff will need to be deactivated first by following the step above.

Managers can activate, deactivate and reactivate a Agency Staff profile provided the 'Agency Staff' feature is enabled. If the 'Agency Staff' feature is disabled, managers will be prevented from reactivating 'Agency Staff' profiles within Workforce, until the feature is enabled again.