“We work 24/7 and we want to change to 10-hour shifts. Can you help us?” How many times have I heard that? At least 2-3 times a week. Yeah, 8-hour shift schedules suck. You might want to read about them here:

·         8-Hour Rotating Shifts (shift-schedule-design.com)

·         8-Hour Fixed Shift Schedules (shift-schedule-design.com)

The problem is that few companies have enough resources to make the change to 10-hour shifts. If you are simply replacing your three 8-hour shifts with three 10-hour shifts, your coverage will be reduced by 25%. For example, if your current 8-hour schedule produces 4-person coverage, a new 10-hour schedule would reduce that to 3-person coverage. 

Why is that? Let’s look at a simple example with rotating shift schedules. Here’s a popular 8-hour pattern called the Continental.

8-Hour Shifts

Key:

D8 = 8-hour day shift

A8 = 8-hour afternoon shift

N8 = 8-hour night shift

This is a 4-week, rotating schedule operated by 4 crews. When the schedule first starts, the crews are assigned to specific weeks in the cycle. Crew A is assigned to start in Week 1, Crew B is assigned to start in Week 2, and so on. At the end of each week, the crews rotate down to the next week in the cycle. Crew A moves to Week 2, Crew B moves to Week 3, etc. When a crew completes the 4th week, they rotate up to Week 1. 

Yes, this is a terrible schedule to work. You work 7 shifts in a row and you have to change shifts every 2-3 days. Worst of all, you only get one weekend off every 4 weeks. 

You'll notice that there is a D8, A8, and N8 under each of the days of the week. This means one crew is scheduled to work each shift, all week long. Maybe not the same crew, but there will always be one crew scheduled for each shift. If the total staff is 16 people, each crew would have 4 employees. That means there would be 4 people at work at all times on a 24/7 basis.

Now let's see what happens if you change to a 10-hour rotating shift schedule.

10-hour Shifts

Changing to 10-hour shifts requires creating a 5^th crew and it doesn’t get rid of the overtime in the schedule. There are better patterns than this one that would give you 2 weekends off every 5 weeks. I can show you options that do this, but not for free.

Since the staff size (16) hasn't changed, four of the crews will only have 3 people and one will have 4 people. This means the coverage will now be only 3 instead of the 4 you had with the 8-hour shifts.

The positives of the 10-hour schedule for employees are that you get more days off (3 days a week for 4 out of 5 weeks) and more weekends off (up to 2 weekends off every 5 weeks). Negatives are the smaller breaks and the change in absence coverage.

With 10-hour shifts, you can't hold people over to cover an absence like you did with 8s. Absences have to be covered by calling people into work who are scheduled to be off. As an employee, you could end up working 5 or more shifts a week depending on the absence rate and whether you had any extra capacity before making this change.

The key question of course is whether it’s worth switching to 10-hour shifts. Increasing the average hours of work by 25% or hiring 25% more employees is hard to justify. Reducing the coverage by 25% is not a good choice either. Would the employees benefit that much? Maybe, maybe not. I find it pretty hard to justify.  

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve written plenty of articles about how to use the 6 hours a day that 10-hour shifts overlap to match the coverage to a variable workload. 10-hour shifts do have a place, if you can afford it. It’s been my experience that few smaller organizations (less than 50 employees) can do it.

Here is another article about 10-hour shifts with links to several of the other articles I've written on this topic: 10-hour Shifts.