Hi Lilian,
The Agent Unavailable Times feature is intended to let agents specify periods when they are not available to be scheduled. WFM then treats those unavailable periods as a hard constraint during schedule generation, meaning it will not create a shift that overlaps with the submitted unavailable time.
I would recommend enabling this feature when the business wants agents to have some input into their availability, especially where employees have contractual, personal, or regional restrictions that cannot always be represented efficiently through standard Work Plans alone.
A few typical use cases are:
- Part-time or flexible employees: An agent may generally be eligible to work Monday–Friday but, for example, cannot work Tuesday before 12:00. Instead of creating a dedicated Work Plan for every individual availability pattern, the agent can enter that period as unavailable.
- Students or employees with recurring commitments: For example, an agent cannot work Wednesday from 08:00–13:00 because of university classes.
- Transportation or childcare restrictions: An agent may only be able to work between 09:00 and 18:00 on certain days.
- Variable availability from week to week: This is particularly useful where availability changes regularly and maintaining many individual Work Plans would create significant administrative overhead.
- Regional or contractual requirements: In some countries or organizations, employees must be allowed to declare when they are available to work. The feature was designed partly to support these types of workforce and labor-agreement requirements.
From a best-practice perspective, I would not use Unavailable Times as a replacement for Work Plans or Time Off.
The Work Plan should still represent the employee's normal contractual working pattern and the flexibility that WFM is allowed to use when creating shifts. Unavailable Times should then represent additional individual restrictions within that possible working window.
For example:
Work Plan:
Monday–Friday, possible shift start between 08:00 and 10:00.
Agent availability:
On Wednesday, the agent specifies that they are unavailable before 09:30.
WFM can still optimize the Wednesday shift within the Work Plan rules, but it cannot schedule that agent before 09:30.
I would also distinguish it clearly from Time Off. If an employee is normally expected to work but requests vacation, PTO, or another absence, that should generally continue to use the Time Off process. Unavailable Times are more appropriate for defining when the employee can or cannot be considered for scheduling in the first place.
Another important consideration is that unavailable time is a hard constraint. WFM respects it even if this results in some trade-off against the optimal service-level coverage. For that reason, I would recommend defining a clear business process around how far in advance agents must enter their availability and when it becomes locked for schedule generation.
So, in summary, I would keep the feature enabled when you have flexible or individually varying availability. For employees with completely fixed and predictable working patterns, the Work Plan alone may already be sufficient and the feature may provide limited additional value.
Hope that helps,
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Robert Tonyka
Sr. Principal PS Consultant
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