Microsoft recently added new features to its Teams service for its Shifts apps to help improve its use for frontline workers and their managers. Today, the company announced another similar improvement, but this one was made for Teams admins.

B Blog post, Microsoft revealed that Teams admins can now go into the Teams admin center and configure settings in the Shifts app. Microsoft says:

This will standardize Shifts app settings across all locations, as admins will be able to uniformly set Shifts app settings, time off reasons, and schedule groups across all front-end teams to avoid inconsistencies between teams.

The Teams admin center will now have a new “Manage front-end experiences” option. Administrators who access it will be able to turn Shifts settings on or off. The options will give managers the power to allow frontline workers and their managers to open, change or offer shifts, along with the ability to request any time off.

Team managers can also add an option for managers to create schedule groups in the Shifts app. Microsoft says:

They start by defining who will have schedule owner permission across all frontline staff by creating a group in Microsoft Entra of all frontline managers. Schedulers are field managers who can create and assign shifts to their frontline workforce.

Microsoft claims that these new management features for shift settings will free up the time frontline managers would normally spend configuring and managing these settings.

A few months ago, Microsoft added some more Shifts features to Teams. This included a way for managers to see the number of their employees available for work each day in their calendars. In April, the Shifts app made some improvements to importing work schedules from Excel into the app.