How to Change Location in When I Work: A Complete Guide

When I Work is a workforce management platform used by thousands of businesses to handle employee scheduling, time tracking, and team communication. One of its core organizational features is the ability to set up and manage locations — which represent physical workplaces, branches, or sites where your team operates.

Whether you're a manager restructuring your business, an employee who's been transferred, or an administrator cleaning up outdated records, understanding how location settings work in When I Work is essential for keeping schedules accurate and teams properly organized.

What "Location" Means in When I Work

In When I Work, a location is a top-level organizational unit. Think of it as a specific physical address or site — a restaurant branch, a retail store, a warehouse, or a service area. Each location can contain:

• Positions (the roles employees fill at that site)
• Schedules (the shift calendars associated with that site)
• Users (the employees assigned to work there)

Locations sit above sites and schedules in the organizational hierarchy. Changing a location — whether that means editing its details, reassigning employees to a different location, or updating the address — affects how schedules are built and how employees receive notifications and assignments.

How to Edit an Existing Location's Details 🗺️

If you need to update the name, address, or settings of a location (rather than move employees between locations), the process is handled through the Admin panel.

To edit location details:

1. Log in to your When I Work account as an Account Administrator
2. Navigate to Apps & Integrations or go directly to the Account Settings section
3. Select Locations & Schedules from the menu
4. Find the location you want to edit and click the pencil/edit icon
5. Update the location name, address, time zone, or other relevant fields
6. Save your changes

It's worth noting that only users with Account Administrator permissions can create, edit, or delete locations. Supervisors and standard employees do not have access to location-level settings unless elevated permissions have been granted.

How to Change Which Location an Employee Is Assigned To

Reassigning an employee to a different location is one of the more common reasons people look into location changes. This is managed through the employee profile, not the location settings themselves.

To reassign an employee:

1. Go to the Team section of your dashboard
2. Click on the employee's name to open their profile
3. Navigate to the Locations & Positions tab within their profile
4. Add the new location and assign the appropriate position
5. Remove the old location if the transfer is permanent, or leave both active if the employee works across multiple sites
6. Save the profile

When I Work supports multi-location employees — meaning a single worker can be assigned to more than one location simultaneously. This is common in businesses where staff float between branches or cover shifts at different sites.

How to Add a New Location

If your business has opened a new site and you need to add it to your When I Work account:

1. Go to Account Settings → Locations & Schedules
2. Click Add Location
3. Enter the location name, address, and time zone
4. Create or assign schedules to that location
5. Add positions relevant to that site
6. Assign employees to the new location through their individual profiles

The time zone setting at the location level is particularly important — When I Work uses it to display shift times correctly for employees working at that site, especially relevant for businesses operating across multiple time zones.

Key Variables That Affect How Location Changes Work

Not every location change is straightforward. Several factors determine how the process plays out in practice:

What Happens to Existing Schedules When You Change a Location

This is where many administrators run into unexpected friction. When you rename a location, existing schedules tied to that location update automatically — the name change is cosmetic and doesn't disrupt assignments.

However, if you delete a location and recreate it, any schedules, shifts, and historical data associated with the original location will not automatically migrate. When I Work generally recommends editing existing locations rather than deleting and recreating them if continuity of records matters.

If employees have already been scheduled at a location and you reassign them mid-cycle, those existing shift assignments remain on the original location's schedule. Managers will need to manually move or recreate those shifts on the new location's schedule if required.

Mobile App vs. Desktop: Where Location Changes Are Made 📱

Location and administrative settings in When I Work are primarily managed through the web dashboard (app.wheniwork.com), not the mobile app. The mobile app is designed for employee-facing functions — viewing schedules, clocking in and out, requesting time off — rather than administrative configuration.

If you're attempting to change location settings from a mobile device, you'll have better results accessing the full web dashboard through a mobile browser rather than relying on the app interface.

The Part That Depends on Your Specific Setup

The steps above cover the standard paths for changing location information in When I Work, but the right approach for your situation depends on factors that vary considerably from one account to the next — the size of your team, how many locations you're managing, whether you're mid-schedule cycle, what integrations are active, and whether you're dealing with a structural business change or a simple data correction. Each of those scenarios calls for a different combination of the steps above, and the consequences of making changes in the wrong order can create scheduling gaps or reporting inconsistencies that take time to untangle.