
HaloITSM Guides
Documentation to assist with the setup and configuration of the HaloITSM platform
Agent Work Hours
In this lesson we will cover:
- What are workdays/work hours used for?
- Configuring Workdays
- Assigning Work hours
What are workdays/work hours used for?
Workdays/work hours in Halo are used for service level agreement tracking and agent time tracking. Workdays and working hours are assigned to SLAs to determine if the SLA timer should be counting down, this stops the timer counting down outside of working hours. Workday functionality for SLA timers is covered in a separate lesson here.
Work hours can also be assigned to agents. Agent work hours do not affect SLA timers but do impact time tracking and agent resource booking. The work hours assigned to an agent will impact how the agent's target hours are calculated for time tracking purposes. Our time tracking functionality is used to track the time agents are spending on each ticket, allowing you to see the work agents complete each day. For more information on our time tracking functionality see our dedicated lesson here. Agent resource booking allows users to book appointments with agents, for more information on this see our lesson here.
Depending on your agents working hours you may wish to configure workdays that can be used for both SLAs and agents, or configure separate workdays for each.
Note: The terms 'workdays' and 'work hours' are used interchangeably here.
Creating Workdays
Workdays are initially created via Configuration > Service Level Agreements > Workdays. Days are given a Start Time and End Time - this equates to the times you expect agents to start and end their workday.
You can set working hours to be uniform across days selected via checking 'Working Hours are the Same Every Day' or specify day-by-day working hours:
Fig 1. Creating Work Days
You can also set a time zone override for these working hours. This can be used to override your default instance time zone when a ticket is using these working hours. Useful when certain tickets are being worked on by teams/agents in a different time zone to the rest of your agents. This is only used for agent resource booking. This will be overridden by the time zone set against the agent's team.
Holidays
The Holidays tab allows you to specify days during the calendar that are not working days, i.e. Christmas Day, public Holidays etc.
Fig 2. Working hours holidays
Holidays can also be imported using the 'Import Holidays' button. This allows you to select a country, year and region to import the holidays of.
If the working hours assigned to the agent have holidays set against them the agent's target working hours for this day will be 0. Additionally if the agent uses their annual leave on a day that is marked as a holiday this day will not be deducted from their allowance.
Breaks
Under the 'Breaks' tab you can configure break times for these working hours. When creating a break time you can set the start/end time as well as the days the breaktime applies to. This break time will be deducted from the agent's target hours for that day.
Fig 3. Break time
When the configured break time occurs:
- OOH responses will be triggered for the agent
- Users will also not be able to book appointments (agent resource booking) with the agent during the break
- This time will be excluded from automatic status change calculations. For example, if a status is set to change if it has not changed for x amount of hours, the break time will not be included in the time of time.
Under the agent profile you will see there is also a setting to determine 'Lunch Break Duration'. Here you can set an overall break time value without assigning a specific time for the break, this will be deducted from the agent's target working hours each day.
Note: If you have configured a break time against the working hours and against the agent profile both will be deducted from the agent's target hours.
Timeslots
Under this tab you can configure timeslots for the working hours. These timeslots are used for Project ticket types where "Use timeslots for start and target times" is enabled. Start/target date fields will be replaced with the timeslots configured here.
Assigning Work hours
Once you have configured your work days/hours you can assign this to an agent. Head to configuration > teams and agents > agents > select an agent. Here, set the working hours this agent uses using the 'Work Hours' field.
Fig 4. Assign agent's work hours
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