When people discuss shift schedules, they tend to focus on the key schedule features like the frequency of weekends off, the number of consecutive days off, how quickly you change shifts, and how many shifts in-a-row you have to work. These features may be important for the people working the schedule, but they overlook the reason for having a schedule in the first place. So much attention has been devoted to all these schedule features that the schedule's purpose has almost been forgotten.

Why do you need a schedule for your employees anyway? Is it to attract and retain good workers? Is it to keep the current workforce happy and motivated? Is it to minimize overtime? Although all of these things are important, they are not the fundamental reason for having a schedule. 

The basic purpose of a schedule is to ensure that you have the right number of the right people at work at the right time, in other words, to match the coverage with the workload. This is sometimes called effective employee utilization. A secondary goal is to minimize costs for the organization, which is often called efficient resource utilization. In short, the schedule enables the organization to effectively and efficiently carry out its responsibilities.

A schedule pattern may be very appealing to employees, but if it doesn't fulfill the essential goals of optimizing coverage and doing it efficiently, it's not good for the organization and should not be considered. If you don't have enough people at work, the organization's mission will be compromised. If you have too many people at work, you're wasting its precious resources. Once the schedule's purpose is achieved, only then can you search for options that maxmize employee satisfaction.

You can read more about this here: https://www.shift-schedule-design.com/Shift_Schedule_Design_for_Dummies.