Welcome to Surfboard 👋
A simpler, smarter and fairer team planning tool for customer service teams at scale.
This guide will tell you how you can add your surfers, create Plans and shift patterns and publish your schedule in no time.
We recommend putting aside an hour or so to do a full set-up depending on your team size. Once you’re all set up, Surfboard will automate your team's schedules right away.
Let’s get started.
The basics
Add your team and personalise their profiles with their contracted hours and timezone
Create custom shift patterns for each of your surfers, including round robins and split shifts.
Use Plans to schedule your team in different ways at different times of the year.
Choose when to publish your shift and activity schedules to your team, and have a safe space to make edits and collaborate with other managers in draft mode.
Surfers are sent published schedules automatically, and receive notifications of when to change activity, take a break or finish up for the day using our Slack app.
Step 1: Set up your team
Time off
Automatically account for surfer time off in your schedules by connecting to the leave calendars for your teams. Just go to Time off in your settings, then for each calendar paste in the iCal link, give it a memorable name, hit save and we’ll do the rest.
For help on finding your time off iCal link in popular calendar clients and HR software, see our guide.
🗓️ If you want us to schedule around something in your calendar like a meeting or a 1:1, simply create an event in your calendar and invite block@teamsurfboard.com and we’ll handle it. See our guide on blocked time for more details.
❗Please note, some HR systems don't share accurate data for half-day bookings, which can result in time off showing as a full day in the Schedule.
Surfers
Now you’re ready to set up your surfers in Surfboard. Go to the Surfers page in settings and add a surfer.
Enter their name and email, contracted hours and closest timezone location. This timezone will show in the schedule so you're always aware of where your team are working from.
You can also create teams to manage your surfers. To create a team go to 'Add team'. You can then choose which surfers to add to which team. Surfers are organised by team in the schedule.
☝ Make sure you enter your surfers full name as it appears in your HR system so we can track their time off through the iCal link.
Step 2: Plan your shifts
Plans
To start scheduling your surfers in Surfboard you need to create a Plan. Plans allow you to schedule your team in different ways throughout the year, for example, to extend your opening hours or add temporary staff to your team during peaks.
We recommend making your standard business-as-usual plan first.
To create a Plan, go to the Plans page and click 'New Plan'. Give your Plan a name, and then add the surfers you'd like to plan shifts for. You can use different Plans for different surfers, making it easier for managers to focus on their own teams.
When you click Save, a new homepage will be made for your Plan. You can customise the header by clicking on it and pasting in the URL of an image.
Now click on 'Shift patterns' to start planning your shifts.
🏄 You can add or remove surfers from your Plan at any time using the table on your Plan's homepage.
Shifts and shift patterns
Surfboard's shift pattern builder lets you plan all of your team's shifts in one, holistic view - giving you full transparency over who will be working when.
First, create your shifts in the left toolbar by clicking 'Create new shift'.
Add in the start and end time of the shift and the timezone that you want it to be scheduled in. When applied to the schedule, Surfboard will automatically convert the time for you, so you don't need to do the maths.
Once you have created your shifts you can simply click into the pattern builder to add shifts for your surfers. Our shift pattern builder has a lot of great tools to help you schedule faster, here's some top tips:
Adding shifts
Click into any day for a surfer to add a shift.
You can give a shift from any timezone to a surfer in any timezone - so you can schedule however makes sense to you.
You can add up to three shifts per surfer, per day - meaning you can easily plan split shifts to accommodate flexible working.
To delete a shift, hover over the shift. A bin icon will show on the shift, click it and the shift will be removed.
Rotation length and patterns
By default, the pattern will be set to 1 week. You can add a blank week by clicking the 'add week' button to the right of the latest week or to duplicate a week, click the 'duplicate week' button at the top-right corner of each week container.
The number of weeks in a pattern determines how long the rotation will be, so if there are 6 weeks, each surfers shift pattern will rotate every.6 weeks when applied to the schedule.
If your surfers work on different-length rotations, you'll need to create additional patterns. To do that click 'create new pattern' at the top-right of the page.
When you create a new pattern you'll be asked which surfers you would like to add to this pattern. When you move surfers to a new pattern, their shifts will be removed.
If you delete a pattern, all the surfers will be moved to the last created pattern and their shifts will be removed.
Grouping surfers
You can group surfers with the same shift pattern by clicking on them and holding down shift on your keyboard. Then, click on the ellipsis icon (...) and select group surfers. All surfers in a group will work the same shifts.
Click on a group at any time to see who's in in, remove surfers or delete the group. If you delete the group, surfers shifts will be removed.
Round robins
Automatically generate round robins for your team using our round robin tool.
Click on 'Add round robin' to start. You'll be asked to add which surfers you want to be included in the round robin.
Select the type of round robin you want to plan:
Basic: one shift on one day with one staffing level.
Advanced: multiple shifts, on multiple days with different staffing levels.
If you select an advanced round robin you can also choose if you want surfers to work every shift or either shift.
For example, if you were rotating shifts on Saturday and Sunday, you can choose if surfers work both those days when it's their turn, or either of those days when it's their turn.
Select the shift you want to rotate and the days you want it to happen on, and how many surfers you need to assigned the shift each week.
Next, you can choose add any time off in lieu. Surfboard will automatically schedule these days off for surfers when it's their turn on the rotation. You can choose for it to be scheduled on the same week or the following week.
Finally, you'll be shown a preview of the rotation. If you don't like the order, you can hit shuffle to generate a new order.
Click Save, and your round robin will be ready to schedule.
💡 If you have an existing round robin order you would like to continue in Surfboard, you can tick the surfers in the order you want them to be scheduled when adding them to the round robin.
🌴 If you delete a round robin shift from the schedule, Surfboard will also remove their time off in lieu for you, automatically.
Step 3: Create your schedule
Applying a Plan
Go to the Schedule page. When you first go to your schedule, it will be empty - now it's time to apply your first Plan.
To apply a Plan to the schedule, go to the 'Apply a Plan' button in the top-right corner of the schedule. You'll be prompted to select the Plan you want to apply and the period you wish to apply it for.
You can also choose which week of the Plan you want to start from. This is helpful if you are restarting a Plan after switching to another one.
Once you're ready, hit Apply and all of your shifts will be automatically added to the schedule for you.
Draft and publish
When you apply a plan all of your shifts will be added in draft by default. Draft shifts are only visible to admins in your account. Surfers can only view these shifts when they are published.
To publish shifts to your surfers, click on the publish button in the top-right of the schedule. Then, select the period you wish to publish and click publish.
When you have published your shifts they will fill with colour. This means that your surfers can now see these shifts in their own surfer account.
If you edit a previously published shift, the shift will go back into draft. This means that the surfer can still see what the original shift was, but not your edits. To share this edit with surfers, publish it again.
💡 Use the publish view toggle at the top of the schedule to easily check which version of the schedule your surfers can see.
Adding, editing or deleting shifts
To edit or delete a shift, simply click on it. Then a modal will appear for you to change the shift to another type (e.g. an early to a late), or to delete the shift completely.
To add a shift, hover over a surfer's day. If the day is empty or has less than 3 shifts already planned then a purple cross will appear - click that to bring up a modal to add shifts. If a surfer's day has more than 3 shifts planned, click on the +more label to view all their shifts and make edits.
💡 In the schedule you can add as many shifts per surfer, per day as needed.
Your Surfboard scheduling is now set up!
You've created your Plan, applied it to the schedule and published your shifts with your team. You're now fully surfing with Surfboard.