USA Shift Operations
Each country has its own laws when it comes to operating shifts.
So this page is about creating staff schedules for American Organisations. In America, companies have no obligation to give their staff any days of holiday, which includes state holidays. However most do offer between 6-20 days per year depending on length of service etc.
The Standard Working Week
A standard working week is 40 hours and the Fair Labour Standards Act states that employees must receive time and a half for all hours worked over the 40 hours in a week. That's not an average of 40hrs per week, it is the actual number in any week.
In the USA, a workweek is defined as a fixed, recurring period of 168 hours, which consists of seven consecutive 24-hour periods. Employers can choose when the workweek starts, but it must remain consistent for payroll calculations. This means that the workweek does not have to align with the calendar week or the employee's pay period, and different groups of employees within the same company can follow different workweeks if required.
So what would the best America staff schedule look like?
The first thing we have to determine is the workload requirements. In most cases of shift working, we do not have flat 24/7 where we need the same number of people on duty for every hour of the day/week/year. Instead most shift operations (in terms of people who have to work shifts), we need a variable number on duty according to the workload. 24/7 jobs like that: police. ambulance, doctors and nurses, call centers, warehouses, pilots, manufacturing, IT, QA, QC, Engineering, entertainment, taxis, trucks, railways, buses, shops, utilities, hotels, breweries, and so on. There are few manufacturing jobs that are running 24/7 for 24 hours a day and 7 days of the week. Most manufacturing, whether it is cars or food, they need to pause the operation on a regular basis for cleaning, maintenance, changing the product, or even to halt production because they are making too much product. Whether they choose to close the operation for a period of time, say a shift, or reduce the numbers on duty, or keep everyone on duty to help out is an operational decision. The point being that very, very few jobs are genuine flat 24/7 operations, because they don't need to be.
Well to avoid the overtime payments to anyone working over 40 hours per week, you could, or should in most cases, use 10-hour shifts.
Everyone is scheduled to cover the workload but is scheduled to work just 10 hours in a day and still match the workload profile over the day or week.
For instance, crime is quite low at night and really low in the early hours, we know this through our analysis of crimes,, they start to ramp up to have two peaks at around 10am and 4pm with a lull around lunch time, criminals have to eat. Hence we need a 24hr presence but not evenly distributed over the 24hrs. We can have a minimum on Nights and most on during the day. This is ideal for using 10hr shifts.
There are a lot of ways to roster 4 shifts over 7 days, about 840 ways of working 4 days out of 7. If we include in the mix the ability to work Earlies, Middays, Lates and Nights, then we are up to 500,000 ways to work 4 days out of 7. Let's stick to 840 for the moment, this is 840 weeks or 16 years before we need to repeat the pattern for an individual. Few people stay with an organisation in the same post for that long Hence we have a lot of ways to set up the weekly schedule of shifts so as to match the workload. There are fewer crimes on weekends so we can put more people on duty during the week.
Of course, crimes being committed and crimes being solved and resolved are two completely different workloads. A lot of police work is things like attending court or interviewing witnesses, which tends to being a week daytime activity.
You would then schedule seven consecutive 10-hour shifts over 2 weeks. This would give everyone an average of 35 hours per week and they would owe you a shift. And everyone would have 25 weeks off in seven day blocks. During those seven days off the shift workers would need to be available to work off their Banked Hours. Their Banked Hours could be up to 320 hours each per year and would be used to cover for absence, training and ad hoc work, all at basic rate. This is a minimum cost solution, and gives your employees a maximum of 25 weeks off per year with no holiday entitlement.
