Overview
Early Access
Work Patterns are the modern, cloud-based way to manage an employee's contracted working hours, replacing Default Hours overrides in Back Office. If your organisation already uses Default Hours overrides, these will be migrated into Work Patterns. Overrides that were enabled become active Work Patterns; the rest are kept as historical patterns for reference. Work Patterns is available for early access. Please reach out to your customer support representative. Early access features: ✅ Record Work Pattern ✅ Multi-week support ✅ Effective date support ✅ Leave requests from Work Pattern (cloud) ✅ Timesheet creation from Work Pattern (cloud) ✅ Award interpretation - overtime/penalty from Work Pattern (cloud) ✅ Payroll processing (cloud) Coming soon: ▶️ Integration Central file import ▶️ Work App Not supported: ❌ Classic App ❌ REST API ❌ Back Office payroll processing
A Work Pattern is a record of an employee's agreed working arrangement - the shifts, breaks, and Location, Department and Role that make up their regular hours. Work Patterns are typically set up and maintained by HR or payroll teams, for example when onboarding a new employee or when a working arrangement changes. Humanforce then uses the pattern as the source of the employee's contracted hours for leave, timesheets, costing and Award Interpretation, and a pattern can include multiple shifts a day, multiple breaks per shift, and cycles that repeat over more than one week.
Work Patterns suit employees with regular, predictable contracted hours, such as full-time and part-time employees. They're not designed for employees with flexible or unpredictable hours, such as casuals, who are usually better managed through rostering instead. A Work Pattern is also not a live roster - it records the employee's agreed arrangement, not what they've been rostered to work, so rosters can change without changing the underlying Work Pattern.
Work Patterns are date-effective: Humanforce uses the pattern active on each specific calendar day, so if an employee's contracted hours change mid-week or mid-pay-period, a single leave request spanning that period automatically applies the correct pattern hours to each respective date. Previous arrangements are kept in the employee's pattern history, making it easy to confirm which hours, breaks and changes applied, and when. If no Work Pattern applies on a given date, leave requests and timesheets are pre-filled with the employee's Award Profile hours instead. If no Award Profile hours are set for that day either, no default hours are available for leave.
Access to Work Patterns is controlled by access level permissions. Depending on your organisation, this might be an HR or payroll administrator, or a workforce manager.
Required access level permission to view Work Patterns:
Maintenance Screens > Employees Screen > Work Patterns
Before you start
An employee's Location, Department and Role must already be set on their profile before you can add a Work Pattern. If any of these are missing, you'll be prompted to complete them first.
Manage an Employee Work Pattern
Follow this guide to view, add, edit or end an employee's Work Pattern.
Go to Management > Employee > Employee Management.
Locate and select the employee.
In the Employment section, select View Work Patterns. This opens the employee's Work Patterns in a new tab.
Part 1: View an existing Employee Work Pattern
Select the Current tab to see the employee's active Work Pattern, or the History tab to see past and superseded patterns.
To look more closely at a historical Work Pattern, select Duplicate on it from the History tab. This opens its details in the same form used for editing, so you can review its shifts and breaks. If you don't want to create a copy, simply navigate away without selecting Save.
Part 2: Add a new Employee Work Pattern
Select Add Work Pattern.
Enter an Effective Date for when the Work Pattern should start applying, and optionally a Description to note what the pattern is for.
Select Add Working Hours.
In the Shift Details section, select the Location, Department and Role for the shift.
Select the Days the shift applies to, and the Week it belongs to.
Enter the shift's Start Time and End Time.
If the shift includes a break, select Add Break, then enter the break's start time, duration and type (paid or unpaid). Repeat this for any additional breaks.
Select Save Working Hours.
Repeat steps 3 to 8 for any other shifts the employee works, such as a second shift on the same day or shifts on other days.
Select Save.
Once saved, the Work Pattern appears under the Current or History tab, depending on its Effective Date.
Overlapping patterns: A new Work Pattern's Effective Date can't fall inside an existing pattern that has both a start and end date. If the dates overlap, you'll be prompted to choose a date after the existing pattern ends, or to change its End Date first.
Superseding a pattern: If you add a new Work Pattern with a later Effective Date while an open-ended pattern is active, the existing pattern is automatically ended the day before the new one starts - you don't need to end it manually.
Part 3: Edit an Employee Work Pattern
Find the Work Pattern you want to change, then select Edit.
To change the Effective Date or Description for the whole pattern, update these details directly.
To edit a specific shift, select Edit Hours next to that shift, then update its details.
Select Save.
Once saved, your changes are reflected on the employee's Work Pattern straight away. Editing an Upcoming Work Pattern (one that hasn't started yet) simply updates it. If you're editing a Work Pattern that's already current, your changes are saved as a new version and the previous version is kept in the History tab for your records, unless you're making a correction within five minutes of first creating it. The new version takes effect from today at the earliest - it can't be backdated.
Existing leave requests aren't automatically recalculated when a Work Pattern is added, edited or ended. If a pattern changes after leave has been submitted or approved, the leave keeps its original calculated hours.
Part 4: End an Employee Work Pattern
Follow these steps when an employee should no longer have a Work Pattern applying, for example if they move to a casual arrangement with no contracted hours.
Find the employee's current Work Pattern, then select Deactivate.
Enter the End Date. The Work Pattern stays active up to and including this date, and no longer applies from the following day. The End Date must be after the pattern's Effective Date, and before the start date of any Upcoming pattern that follows it.
Select Save.
Once its End Date has passed, the Work Pattern moves to the History tab with a status of Outdated. If the employee needs a Work Pattern again in future, add a new one from the date it should start applying.
A Work Pattern can also end automatically when superseded by a newer one - see superseding a pattern above.
Additional information
Applying a shift to multiple days or weeks at once: when adding working hours, you can select more than one day or week at a time (or use All Days, Weekdays or Weekends) to apply the same shift details across them in one go, rather than repeating the steps for each.
Adding a single shift to one day: you can also select Add shift for this day next to an empty day in the working hours table, which opens the same form pre-filled for that day.
Award Profile display: the Award Profile shown in the Shift Details section is for reference only, based on the Role you select. Pay calculations always use the Award Profile that's currently in effect, not a snapshot from when the Work Pattern was created.
Overlapping shifts: if the shift you're adding overlaps with hours already saved for that day, you'll see a warning preventing you from saving.
Adding more weeks: if the employee's pattern repeats over more than one week, select Add week to add a new, empty week, or Duplicate week to copy an existing week's shifts as a starting point. Every week needs at least one shift before you can save the Work Pattern.
Duplicating a shift or a Work Pattern: select Clone hours next to a shift to quickly create a similar shift on another day or week. To copy an entire Work Pattern, select Duplicate from the Work Pattern list.
Deleting instead of ending: you can only delete a Work Pattern that hasn't started yet (status of Upcoming). Once a Work Pattern has become current, it can't be deleted, only ended or replaced by a new version, so that a full history is kept for your records. Deleting an Upcoming Work Pattern requires the additional Delete Pattern access level permission.
Rest days: a day with no scheduled shift under an active Work Pattern is treated as a rest day. Pay and costing calculations apply zero contracted hours for that day - Award Profile hours are never used - so any shifts actually worked may attract overtime or penalty rates. For convenience, leave requests and timesheet creation for that day are pre-filled with the employee's Award Profile hours, just as if no Work Pattern applied. As with any pre-filled hours, you can still change them before submitting.