schedules | Shiftwork Solutions LLC - Shift Schedule Change Management

What is the best schedule?

Answer from Ethan Franklin: While traveling to a client last week, the person sitting next to me on the plane asked me what I do for work. When I explained that I help companies and employees find and implement the best schedule, they immediately asked: So, what is the best schedule?

I have been asked this question, or a close variation, dozens and dozens of times during my almost three-decade career in shiftwork consulting. The very short answer is: it depends. A better short answer is: There is not a universal best schedule, the best schedule is the schedule that works best for the unique employees and the unique business at your facility.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, 4 key areas influence the best schedule for a particular business or location:

4 Key Areas:

Industry and Operations: The nature of your business dictates the hours and the staffing the business needs to run. Does your business run 24 hours a day? Must all hours in the day be staffed the same way? Must you run weekends? Is there a high and low season? All these aspects are based on factors such as production needs, customer demands, and equipment usage. Before showing any potential schedules to employees, you must first make sure that all those schedules will meet the business requirements.
Employee Preferences: Understanding your employees’ needs and preferences is critical. A schedule that, on paper, works for the business but doesn’t work for employees will drive costly turnover and low productivity. Luckily, there are usually many different schedules that will meet the business requirements. Each schedule will have its own set of pros and cons. Educating and getting feedback from your workforce will allow them to choose the schedule that works best for them. Two facilities with the exact same business requirements may each have a very different “best schedule” based on their unique employee population. Factors like childcare, commuting, and personal commitments (school, church, coaching a team, etc.) influence each employee’s ideal schedule.
Employee Well-being: Shift work can impact health. Consider factors like sleep patterns, fatigue, and work-life balance of each schedule.
Labor Laws, Regulations, Pay Policies and Union Contracts: Adherence to wage, overtime, and break regulations is essential. In addition, individual company policies on overtime, vacation, holidays, etc. can have a dramatic financial effect if not carefully reviewed. If there is a union contract this can add another level of analysis.

While the 4 key factors above must be examined to help find the best schedule, it is very important to have a well thought out schedule program to get all employees involved in the process. Change can be difficult for managers as well as hourly employees so make sure to educate and get everyone’s feedback. Here are a few tips:

Tips for a Successful Schedule Program:

Analyze Data: Gather, analyze and share data on both the business requirements and employee preferences.
Communicate and Educate Clearly: Ensure employees at all levels understand the potential schedules, their rationale, and any changes in pay policies. If there is a union at the facility, they must be part of the communication plan.
Involve Employees: Seek input from everyone in your workforce to create a schedule that aligns with their needs and preferences. Asking just a few people on each shift, or worse just the day shift, is not going to give you the full picture of employee preferences.
Offer Flexibility: Where possible, provide options for employees to manage their schedules, such as shift swapping or time-off requests.

Many businesses are looking for the generic best schedule. One that, with no effort, will solve all their schedule problems. Unfortunately, finding the best schedule for your facility takes time and effort. However, this effort has a tremendous payoff. Carefully considering the 4 key areas above and implementing a well-structured scheduling program, you can create a work environment that improves employee satisfaction, optimizes productivity, and drives business performance. If your facility is having schedule challenges (employee turnover, hard to recruit and retain new employees, increasing unit cost, seasonality, high overtime, etc.) schedule a call with me or one of my colleagues.

6-day schedules (part 4)

This is the fourth and final post in a series of four posts regarding 6-day schedules. Here are the links to 6-day schedules (part 1), 6-day schedules (part 2) and 6-day schedules (part 3).

In this post, we will look at two extremes when it comes to covering 6 days. One uses extra staffing to cover 6 days with 40-hour workweeks. The other uses traditional staffing for a 48-hour workweek but has a few 12-hour shifts to give an occasional weekend off.

First, let’s consider a schedule that covers 6 days with 40-hour workweeks. This is more complicated than you might think. Why? Well, there are 144 hours in a 6-day period. If a crew is worth 40 hours, then you would need 3.6 crews to provide coverage (144/40=3.6).

This is accomplished by having each of your three 8-hour crews being 20% larger than the number of people you expect to show up each day. In this way, one out of every 6 people can be off on any given day (except Sunday when everyone is off).

Here is what the schedule looks like:

You will notice that to have 5 people show up on any given day, you need to have 6 people assigned with one of those 6 being off on that day.

First, the good news about this schedule. Everyone gets Sunday off plus one other day that week. This should increase alertness (compared to the alternative of only getting Sunday off and no others during the week). That’s about it as far as the good news goes.

There are several problems:

Supervisors cannot match their crews unless they work all 6 days. If they also take a day off, then provisions must be made to cover for their open position.
People like two days off but generally prefer then to be two days off together. Most shift workers will place a low value on having, for example, Tuesday off as their second day off that week.
The staffing requirement must be a multiple of 5. This schedule works well if you need 15 or 375 people, but it will not work if you need 7 or 18 people.
Night shift alertness will suffer as night shift people lose some of their “night time adjustment” during their day off.
Cross-training is required since every combination of 5 out of 6 must represent all of the skills needed to get the job done.
Twice every 6 weeks there are “split workdays”. This is where they are off the day(s) before and the day(s) after a single day of work. Shift workers will quickly recognize that these solitary days are good days to feel…maybe a little too sick to come into work.
Companies ofter go to this type of schedule in an attempt to avoid the “high cost” of overtime; failing to realize that overtime and straight time are generally “cost equal”.

Onward…

This next schedule is an attempt to keep things simple and yet, still, give the employees a full weekend off once every three weeks. “Keeping things simple” basically says, work everyone for 6 days in a row, all 8-hour shifts. The workforce might not like this. Alertness, safety, and productivity will suffer; but it’s “simple.”

Now to get a full weekend off with the smallest departure from “simple” you must work 12-hour shifts on two out of every three weekends. The third weekend is off.

Here is the schedule:

This schedule is only popular among those that place a very high value on full weekends off. Working 6 days in a row is hard enough. This schedule not only calls for that, but it makes one of those 6 days, a 12-hour day. The result is a full weekend off once every three weeks.

This is probably not a sustainable schedule for more workplaces. However, in the short run, it may be just what you need.

Call Us and We Can Help

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005 to discuss your operations and how we can help you solve your shift work problems. You can also complete our contact form and we will call you.

Staffing, overtime and your schedule

One of the most common and misunderstood issues surrounding schedules is the relationship between staffing, overtime and the schedule itself.

The reality is that a schedule has no impact on the quantity of overtime your site is experiencing.

Overtime is a function of (1) How much work is there to do and (2) How many people do you have to do that work.

Your schedule only tells you “when” the overtime will occur.

If you take a look at all the hours it takes to get a job done, and then look at how many people you have to do the work, you will know how many hours per person will be needed.

If you have 4,200 hours of work to be done next week and 100 employees to do it, then everyone will average 42 hours of work for an overtime rate of 5%. Notice that the schedule played no role in determining this figure.

So where does a schedule come into play?

In most cases, a schedule will tell you “when” the overtime will occur.

For example, if your schedule has short shifts (i.e. 8 hours or less), the overtime is typically worked before or after a regular shift. There are two reasons for this. First, the shift is short enough that you can add hours to it without adversely impacting safety or productivity. Secondly, the shorter the shift, the more days of work your schedule will have. This means you have fewer days off. The fewer days you have off, the more you want to protect them. Therefore, if you have to work overtime, you’d rather do it on a day when you are already at work rather than giving up one of your preciously few days off.

If you have longer shifts (i.e. 10-hour or 12-hour shifts) then overtime is much more likely to occur on a regularly scheduled day off. There are two reasons for this. First, the longer the shift, the fewer hours you can add before the shift become too long and begin to adversely impact alertness, safety, and productivity. Secondly, longer shifts have many more days off. More days off has the impact of lessening the value of a day off, (In much the same way that diamonds would be less valuable if they were laying around everywhere.) This means that it is less painful to give up a day off when you have a lot of them.

There is one condition where the schedule can play a role in the “quantity” of overtime – When you have the wrong schedule to begin with.

The wrong schedule can cause you to take the “perfect” number of people and put them in less than perfect locations. For example, if you have the right number of people but your schedule causes you to be overstaffed during some time periods; you will then be understaffed during other time periods. This will cause overtime. More importantly, they will cause Idle Time when you are overstaffed along with the Overtime for when you are understaffed. Both of these conditions create high avoidable costs that can be eliminated with the right schedule.

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005.

Changing Schedules 101

Every now and then, I like to return to the basics. Today I’m going to cover some of the basic DOs and DON’Ts for those of you considering a change to your schedule.

DO make sure you have clearly identified your needs. Changing schedules can be a traumatic experience for your workforce. You don’t want to put them through it over and over again and you seek the perfect schedule coverage through a series of Trials and Errors.

DON’T think that there is a schedule where 100% of your workforce will be happy. There are two reasons for this. First of all, shift workers judge a schedule by the time off it provides. Since everyone goes to different lifestyles when they leave work, it is not surprising that they will have different opinions about what schedule best serves their needs. Secondly, about 5% of every workforce comes to work to be the contrary. They will oppose any change. In fact, if you try to appease them by not changing anything – they will oppose that.

DO keep the workforce informed. As with any change, rumors are the enemy. There has never been an instance where two shift workers are talking and one says, “I wonder what’s going on with our schedule” and the other one replies, “I have no idea but I’m sure we will like whatever it is that they come up with.” If what you are planning to do is the right thing, then you should make whatever effort it takes to share your thoughts and actions with those that will be impacted.

DON’T assume that a small change is easy to make. If you don’t believe this, tell the workforce that you intend to change the shift start times by 15 minutes; then stand back and watch what happens.

DO get the workforce involved. No one likes to be told what to do. If you need to change schedules, there must be a reason for this. Tell the workforce and then solicit their input in creating a solution. There are always numerous solutions to a scheduling issue; many of which will work equally well. Since this is the case, why not use the schedule that best meets the needs of your employees. They know better than you when it comes to knowing what they want.

DON’T assume your current pay and work policies for your current schedule will work equally well for your new schedule. Things like a vacation, holiday pay and shift differential must be addressed to make sure they are not costing you or the workforce more on the new schedule. When companies contact Shiftwork Solutions because their 24/7 schedule does not work, the problem is rarely with the pattern and nearly always has something to do with policies.

DO your math. It’s one thing to think you know what you need, it’s another to be able to demonstrate it on paper. If you can’t justify your schedule change using math, then maybe you are making a change based more on assumptions rather than reality. I personally don’t like to guess. I like to measure twice and cut once.

DON’T take short cuts. Being “penny wise” will result in mistakes and missed opportunities that you will not quickly recover from.

DO be thorough. Involve everyone in your change process; even those that will not be impacted. Telling a group “We are changing schedules over in that area and you will not be affected,” is much better than leaving an unaffected group out of the loop and allowing them to make up their own reality.

Call Us and We Can Help

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005 to discuss your operations and how we can help you solve your shift work problems. You can also complete our contact form and we will call you.

Getting the Workforce Involved

I recently received a telephone call from a company that was having problems with their shift schedule. The problem, it seemed, was that people were complaining about the schedule. The company could hear the complaints but was having a hard time interpreting what they were hearing. Was it just a few “squeaky wheels” doing all of the complaining or was there a general rumbling throughout? Was there a specific problem or were there several issues?

The obvious concern the company had was that they needed to qualify and quantify the problem before they could take action to fix it.

This is where we came in. Our two-survey process accomplishes the following:

The entire workforce is involved.

One person, one survey eliminates the “squeaky wheel” issue.

The first survey finds the problem, the second survey narrows down the possible solutions

The surveys made sure everyone knows what is going on.

The results from the surveys are shared with the workforce making the process “transparent” and the results data-driven.

If you are planning a change to your shift schedule, regardless of how small and apparently inconsequential, get the workforce involved. It is their schedule. They have structured their lifestyles around it. Any change will have an impact on them and their families. Getting them involved helps them to understand what is happening, why it is happening and when it is happening. It also lets them have some input into the final solution.

Call or text us today at (415) 858-8585.