A thought occurred to me when I was having a casual conversation with a friend the other day. We were talking about different workplaces where there can be a considerable amount of shift work and how it can be a challenge for the person making up the schedule.

He or she has to make sure that there is the right combination of people working at any given time, given a defined pool of employees. At the same time, he or she has to juggle their availability requests and other concerns. Then, we thought of a solution that might work: Google Calendar.

This free resource allows any single account to create multiple calendars. From there, the additional calendars can then be individually shared with other Google users. Using this framework, the scheduler can have the “master” account with everyone’s calendar, inputting the different shifts and using the color-coding to organize the right mix of talent and skills.

On the flip side, the employees can also submit their availability requests through this. If they need July 3rd off, they can indicate as such in their own calendar. There’s lots of space for additional notes as necessary.

This kind of infrastructure is clearly not at all suitable for very large companies with very large numbers of employees, but relatively small businesses may find some value here. The automatic notifications of changes, the easy integration with smartphones, and the simple “sharing” aspect can all prove quite useful.