Time-to-Shrinkage Translator

Convert each off-phone activity from its natural unit — minutes per week, hours per year, days per year — into a consistent daily shrinkage percentage. See total productive time remaining per shift.

This tool converts off-phone activities expressed in various time units (minutes per day, hours per week, hours per month, days per year, or direct percentages) into a unified shrinkage percentage and FTE multiplier. The conversion uses standard workforce planning constants: 5 working days per week, 21.5 working days per month (accounting for weekends across an average month), and 260 working days per year (52 weeks x 5 days). Each activity's time consumption is normalized to daily minutes, then expressed as a percentage of the configured shift length.

The FTE multiplier is calculated as 1 / (1 - total_shrinkage_percentage). This represents the gross-to-net staffing factor: if total shrinkage is 30%, you need 1.43x the Erlang-calculated requirement to account for agents who are scheduled but not available. The model assumes shrinkage activities are additive and uniformly distributed across the workforce — it does not account for concurrency (e.g., if team meetings happen simultaneously for all agents) or scheduling offsets.

Practitioners should ensure every off-phone activity is captured, including PTO/vacation (often the largest single contributor), paid breaks, meetings, coaching, training, system downtime, and administrative tasks. The FTE multiplier is applied after Erlang C calculation: Required_Staff = Erlang_Agents x FTE_Multiplier. Shrinkage below 25% likely means activities are unmeasured or underreported. Shrinkage above 45% warrants investigation into whether activities can be compressed, staggered, or eliminated. The donut chart breakdown helps identify which categories offer the most recovery opportunity.