How to write a shift handover
Five real lines written badly and rewritten, with the reason for each change. Read this one first: the others are structures to fill in, this one is what to put inside them.
Four templates · plain text · no sign-up
The templates we used, published as they are.
There is no form and we do not ask for an email: download them as plain text, paste them wherever you keep things, adapt them. They work without Ospivia — in fact the right way to try them is on paper, for a week, before thinking about a tool at all.
No formNo email requiredNo guest data
The four
Written for the shift, not for the brochure.
Front desk handover log
What the incoming shift needs to find: open items, owner, next action, and the read-back that confirms the handover actually happened.
Maintenance handover log
Open technical items with the verified symptom, the current operational state, an owner and the trigger for escalation.
Shift report email
For teams that hand over by email: the same discipline in a format nobody has to be taught.
When a sheet stops being enough
Three signals, and before them you do not need anything else.
When the same lines are needed by two shifts on the same day and the sheet lives on one desk. When somebody has to be able to see what was picked up without asking out loud. When the same thing gets reported twice because there is no way to know it was already closed.