Hi Melissa,
Only On Queue activity types can be scheduled against a forecast. In your scenario, if the entire shift is configured as Back Office / Off Queue, that activity is not optimized against forecasted workload. As a result, the placement of the back-office activity, breaks, and meals will be more static compared with a standard On Queue work plan.
One option is to create several work plans with predefined patterns and include them in a work plan rotation. This allows you to stagger meal times, maintain better coverage throughout the day, and distribute different shift or meal times more fairly across agents.
Rotation 1 – same shift, different meal times
In this example, all agents work the same shift, but meal times are staggered to ensure that not all agents are at lunch at the same time:
- Work Plan 1: Mon–Fri, 08:00–16:00, lunch at 11:00
- Work Plan 2: Mon–Fri, 08:00–16:00, lunch at 12:00
- Work Plan 3: Mon–Fri, 08:00–16:00, lunch at 13:00
Rotation 2 – different shift start times and staggered meals
In this example, agents rotate through different shift start times for better coverage and fairness, with the meal scheduled around the middle of each shift:
- Work Plan 1: Mon–Fri, 08:00–16:00, lunch at 12:00
- Work Plan 2: Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00, lunch at 13:00
- Work Plan 3: Mon–Fri, 10:00–18:00, lunch at 14:00
This approach provides some flexibility and fairness even though the Back Office activity itself is not being dynamically scheduled against forecasted demand.
Alternatively, you could model the Back Office work as an On Queue activity and schedule it against a forecast-for example, using a manually created flat forecast. This gives the scheduling engine more flexibility to optimize the placement of shifts, breaks, and meals against the defined workload.
Operationally, the agents could still use this time for back-office work. When they go On Queue, they can deactivate themselves from the queues they are not expected to handle and remain activated only for the queue(s) they should support when additional coverage is needed due to peak volumes.
The second approach can provide more dynamic scheduling, but I would recommend validating the queue activation/deactivation process and its impact on WFM adherence and reporting to make sure it matches the intended operational model.
Hope that helps,
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Robert Tonyka
Sr. Principal PS Consultant
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