Every frontline operations leader knows the feeling: shift starts in 30 minutes, and you're scrambling to figure out who's actually showing up.
We're ending that chaos. Permanently.
Join Alvaro Soto, VP of Product at TeamSense, for a 30-minute look at what's coming next, and why 2026 is the year frontline staffing stops being reactive.
The challenge: the 3 a.m. scramble nobody records
Alvaro opens with a supervisor's morning, pulled straight from customer and design partner conversations.
- The mental list. Three call-off texts arrive at 3 a.m. Nothing tells the supervisor who's available and qualified, so they start working names from memory. Two don't answer. One says no.
- The hidden cost. An average of 45 minutes to find coverage, and three to five phone calls per open position.
- The knowledge that walks out the door. None of those decisions get captured anywhere. When the supervisor transfers or retires, everything they knew goes with them.
At one sugar co-op customer, the mental list barely functions during fall campaign, when headcount climbs from 200 to over 600 in a matter of weeks.
Key insights from Alvaro Soto
- Attendance was the wedge, not the destination. A daily, trusted text connection with every frontline worker is the foundation everything else gets built on.
- Trusted beats complete. Alvaro would rather have 60% of the data fully confirmed than 100% of it half trusted. Supervisors will use a system that admits what it doesn't know and abandon one that confidently tells them something wrong.
- The supervisor is the source of truth. Their judgment is the asset that's currently getting lost every shift, and capturing it is the point.
How TeamSense plans to get there
1. Know who's actually here
Phase one works today: someone calls off, TeamSense catches it, the supervisor knows before the shift starts. Phase two goes after the harder question who's in, and who's home unscheduled and would happily take the shift. At Cushman & Wakefield, with 12,000 deskless workers, a single call-off currently travels through a manager, an offsite team, a ServiceNow ticket, and payroll. That relay produces roughly 800 payroll edits a month.
2. Make labor a known variable
Phase three, the shift start snapshot, is in pilot with design partners and captures the handoff context that usually lives in a two-minute conversation or evaporates. Phases four and five add skills and certifications, validated by supervisors in the flow of work rather than pulled from an HR spreadsheet nobody has touched in six months. The goal is answering what can realistically run today given who showed up.
3. Recommend, but don't decide
Phases six and seven bring backfill recommendations. The system finds the gap, matches available and qualified people, and hands over a short list. Supervisors approve, modify, or reject and every one of those calls becomes data the company can finally learn from. Alvaro is explicit that TeamSense is not building autonomous staffing decisions.
Frequently asked questions from the webinar
How will this handle union rules, CBAs, and seniority-based call-off lists? TeamSense has points visibility today through connected systems and is building native points calculation this year. Combined with skills, certifications, and employee profiles, that's how site-specific constraints get represented. One customer, Landel, runs 14 attendance policies across 12 union CBAs.
Does this require an API? TeamSense itself doesn't. These roadmap capabilities will, because recommendations delivered at 3 a.m. can't run on week-old data.
What maintenance does this create internally? The intent is none beyond maintaining your existing HRIS. Alvaro's plan is to take imperfect source data, let supervisors confirm what's real, and eventually write the clean version back.
Curious where your floor fits in this
TeamSense is actively recruiting design partners for the shift start pilot and the phases that follow. If you run a floor and have opinions about what these workflows should look like in practice, the product team wants to hear them.
Watch the replay for the full phase-by-phase walkthrough and the complete Q&A.
Webinar Length:
30 mins
