Here's another comment I read at the 911Dispatch forum from someone who wants to adopt 10-hour shifts:

"Our center has been looking into getting away from our 8 hour shifts. Most everyone here wants either 8's or 10's, 12's are out of the question for now anyways. We have 12 full time dispatchers, 3 being leads. Has anyone found a way to work a ten hour schedule with that number of people? Most of the research I've done says it is not able to be done."

I'm going to break my comments down into a couple of categories:

1. Workload. Is there ever a mention of a variable workload? No. So why are they considering 10-hour shifts? 10-hour shifts are only appropriate for organizations whose workload varies throughout the day. I suspect that the desire to adopt 10-hour shifts is merely employee preferences to get more days off and more weekends off. Unfortunately, this is insufficient justification. 10-hour shifts require some major sacrifices, so you'll need a lot more than just employee preferences to support the change. Sorry to be so blunt about it, but there are several limitations to 10-hour shifts that employees fail to recognize. Some of them will be discussed below.

2. Coverage/staffing. To provide 3-person coverage on a 24/7 basis using 10-hour shifts would require 15 employees working an average of 42 hours a week. This organization only has 12 employees. They could have 3-person coverage on one shift and 2-person coverage on the other two shifts. If they tweaked the start/end times on the shifts, they could make the overlapping shifts cover another 6 hours of the day. The end result would be 4-person coverage for 6 hours, 3-person coverage for 10 hours, and 2-person coverage for 8 hours.

3. Crews. Most 10-hour shift schedules don't use crews. They are what I refer to as "crewless" schedules. For this group, I would create a 12-week schedule. Each employee would be initially assigned to one of the 12 weeks. When they finished the first week, they would rotate to the next week of the schedule. They would continue doing this until the finished the entire schedule, at which time they would go back to the first week of the schedule.

4. Leads. There are 3 leads. If they are working 10-hour shifts and are needed at all times, the organization would need 2 more leads. Even then, they would have to work 42 hours a week on average. And they wouldn't always be working with the same set of employees. This will make it much more difficult to supervise.

5. Overtime. Sometimes people think that changing to 10-hour shifts will allow them to have a schedule with no overtime built into it. Unfortunately, that only occurs with certain levels of coverage. The most efficient 10-hour schedule will have multiples of 7 people on each shift which will produce multiples of 4-person coverage. For the 3-person coverage this organization needs, overtime would be needed to ensure consistent coverage. As with their current 8-hour schedule, they would average 42 hours per week if they had 15 employees.