Both an employment status and a working pattern show what days an employee works.
Employment statuses
Typically, you would add an Employment Status that reflects working days, rather than specific working hours. For example, useful for standard Monday to Friday 9-5 roles, or other schedules where the hours and days an employee works are the same every week.
Other purposes of an employment status
You can use it as a label to categorise staff, for example, full-time, part-time, volunteer, contractor, etc.
Show their working and non-working days, which will be used for time off policies based on calendar settings
Show non-working days on the calendar
Working patterns
Typically, you would use a working pattern to set what specific hours the employee works per day, whether this is the same working hours each day or a regular shift pattern where an employee works different hours daily as a set shift. For example, working Monday 9am-5pm, Tuesday 8am-4 pm, Wednesday 9am-1pm etc.
Other purposes of a working pattern
Record of contracted hours visually for record-keeping
You can use it to show working days that differ week to week, for example, if someone works a two-week shift pattern
Use for working pattern-based time off policies
Use to for pre-filling timesheets or calculating overtime in Timesheets
📎NOTE: A working pattern doesn't show on the calendar.