Shift handover
The structured transfer of information from an outgoing shift to the incoming one, so nothing in progress is lost at the boundary.
A shift handover is the transfer of information from the outgoing shift to the incoming one: what happened, what is unfinished, and what the next team needs to watch. It happens at every shift boundary whether or not anybody has designed it, and the difference between operations is only whether it is structured or left to whoever happens to still be standing there.
What gets lost without one
The things that fall through a handover are almost always the things in progress: a delivery that arrived short, a machine behaving oddly, a customer promised a call back, a task half done. None of them are on a checklist, because a checklist covers the routine. The cost lands on the incoming shift, who discover each item at the worst possible moment.
- Anything unfinished and who was doing it
- Problems reported but not resolved
- Commitments made to customers or suppliers
- Anything unusual about equipment, stock or staffing
Making it survive a bad day
Verbal handovers fail exactly when they matter most, because a busy close is when the outgoing shift leaves fastest. A written record attached to the shift survives that, and it also creates something the next manager can read hours later. Keep it short enough that it is done under pressure: a long template on a bad night gets skipped entirely, which is worse than three honest lines.
“The handover you only do on quiet days is the one you do not have on the days you need it.”
How Formclock handles this: team messaging.
Explore team messaging