A majority of the organizations that cover 24/7 use 8-hour fixed shifts. That would be fine if it weren't for the fact that employees hate the schedules. The universal complaint is that they don't get enough days or weekends off. They simply want a better work-life balance.

The employees think 10-hour shifts would be a good choice, but the increased staffing requirements prevent most organizations from adopting them. Most employees don't want 12-hour shifts, though when they see actual examples of 12-hour schedules, they often change their minds. But let's focus this article on 8-hour shifts.

There are a lot of different patterns with 8-hour fixed shifts. Unlike 12-hour schedules that normally use 4 crews, 8-hour schedules can use anywhere from 6 to 27 crews. The number depends on the coverage levels, as shown in the table below:

Are you thoroughly confused? Sorry. There's a lot of information in this chart. Let me try to explain using 5-person coverage as an example. There are 2 rows with 5-person coverage. On the first row, 7 people are required if they work an average of 40 hours a week. On the second line, 8 people are required, but they only have to work an average of 35 hours a week. 

Why would you adopt a schedule that only averages 35 hours a week? People do it all the time. Not because they want fewer hours. They chose a popular work pattern without realizing that it averages less than 40 hours. In this case, the pattern is 5 days of work followed by 3 days off, aka 5-on-3-off.

Continuing with the example, you'll next see the maximum weekends off. The maximum with 7 people per shift is 2 weekends off every 7 weeks whereas the max. with 8 people per shift is 3 weekends off every 8 weeks. After that is a tally of the number of possible schedules along with descriptions of those schedules. Max. 7 days means the schedule requires working 7 consecutive days at some point. In general, the more days worked, the more weekends off.

A significant portion of my clients contact me because they have adopted a popular 8-hour work pattern, and they're tired of the employee complaints and never having enough or consistent coverage. I try to show them both alternative approaches (i.e. different shift lengths) and other 8-hour options. This way they can compare the coverage, average hours of work, weekends off, and so on. This chart illustrates the possibilities for 8-hour fixed shifts only.

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When creating a work schedule for your employees, I recommend the following steps:

1. Coverage. The primary purpose of the schedule is to match the coverage with the workload, so this should always be your first step. If you start by searching for schedules with a desired shift length or a popular work pattern, you won't get an effective schedule. Your schedule needs to be designed around the number of people you need working during different times of the day on each day of the week that you're open. You can read more here:  Variable Workloads

2. Shift length. How many hours a day are you trying to cover? If it's less than 12 hours, you should use that as the shift length. If it's more than 12 hours, you'll need two or more shifts. Shifts less than 8 hours long will require part-time employees. If you are covering 24 hours a day, you might be able to use 8, 10 or 12-hour shifts. This guide will help:  Shift Length Selection

3. Format. If you have more than one shift per day, you'll have to decide if you want employees to always work the same hours (i.e. the same shift), or if you want them to work different hours from time-to-time, i.e. rotating shifts. Most full-time employees will prefer to work the same hours (i.e. fixed shifts). On the other hand, you may want them to gain experience both opening and closing, or working during both the busy and slower periods. Read about the pros and cons of each approach here:  Fixed vs. Rotating Shifts.htm

4. Staffing. Determine how many people it takes to produce the desired coverage. Do you need to hire more staff or increase the overtime? Here's a tool to help:  Staffing Calculator

5. Work Pattern. Develop alternative work patterns. Most shift lengths have a number of popular patterns for 24/7 coverage. Will any of those work? You may need to modify them or create new ones from scratch. It's critical to match the schedule to the organization's pay week to avoid unnecessary overtime and to ensure maximum weekends off for employees.

6. Alternatives. When I design schedules, I often look for alternative approaches using different shift lengths or combinations of shift lengths. For example, in 24/7 operations with an uneven workload, you might be able to use 8-hour shifts, combined 8 and 12-hour shifts, or sometimes even 10-hour shifts. For each approach, I then try to come up with a few different work patterns. Every option has different pros and cons, so having alternatives to compare will help you find the best schedule.

Need expert assistance? We've helped over a thousand companies from all over the world, in every industry imaginable. Contact us today:  Contact Us

If you've searched my website for articles about 10-hour shifts, you'll see that I have a pretty negative opinion toward them in 24/7 operations. Here are links to some of those articles:

1. 10-Hour Shifts in 24/7 Operations (shift-schedule-design.com)
    
2. 10-Hour Shifts for 24/7 Coverage (shift-schedule-design.com)
    
3. 10-Hour Shift Schedules and Police Management (shift-schedule-design.com)
    
4. 10-Hour Shift Schedules for Police Officers (shift-schedule-design.com)

Most of the issues I raise are management concerns, like the fact that 10-hour shifts require at least 25% more staff than 8 or 12-hour shifts. Nevertheless, employees tend to believe that 10-hour shifts are the ideal shift length. They would do anything (maybe including a pay cut) to get them. Since employees love them so much, maybe it's worth the extra cost. After all, wouldn't it be great to have a happy, enthusiastic workforce? 

The table below shows the staff needed to different levels of coverage:

Coverage levels greater than 5 would either be a multiple of one of the levels shown or it would require a custom-designed schedule. For example, 6-person coverage would use a schedule for 3-person coverage, whereas 7-person coverage would require a custom-designed schedule.

With some of these coverage levels, the schedule would have one or two overlapping days. This will produce more coverage than needed. This is necessary to ensure 40-hour work weeks. You can only avoid this by having an occasional 30-hour work week, which few employees would tolerate.

3-person coverage is the only level that would require some overtime in the schedule (a 50-hour work week once every 5 weeks). If you want to avoid the OT, you'd have to employ 6 people per shift or 18 total employees. I don't think it's worth it, but that's your call.

Want to see a few templates for your coverage requirements? You won't find these elsewhere on the Internet. They have to be custom-designed. Please fill out this form to get an idea of what we would provide and how much we would charge:

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I've never seen statistics on this but, based on the inquiries for scheduling help I've had over the past 20 years, it appears that a majority of the companies that cover 24/7 use 8-hour fixed shifts. One big reason they never switched to 12-hour shifts was because their workload varied in 8-hour increments. They needed more workers during the daylight shift(s) or, in the case of police, paramedics, and call centers, they needed more workers during the evening hours, especially on Friday and Saturday.

These companies don't realize that it's possible to adopt a schedule with both 8 and 12-hour shifts. You simply create a 12-hour pattern that covers 24/7 and provides the coverage needed on the shift with the lowest workload (usually the night shift). Then you overlay that with one or two 8-hour shifts during the busier times of the day.

Here's an example. Suppose you need 4 people working from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 2 people at all other times. You would adopt a 12-hour schedule that produces 2-person coverage on both shifts and overlay that with a single 8-hour day shift that produces 2-person coverage. The combination produces the exact coverage needed: 4 people from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 2 people from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m.

Here's another example. You need 4 people from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. and 2 people the rest of the day. You would use a 12-hour schedule with 2-person coverage on both shifts. Then you would overlay that with two 8-hour shifts, each with 2-person coverage. That would give you 4-person coverage during the entire busy period.

Employees don't really like 8-hour schedules. They don't get many days off, they have to work a lot of consecutive shifts, and most importantly they don't get many weekends off. Why not give some of the employees a better schedule using 12-hour shifts. Not everyone will like the 12s, so they can stay on one of the overlay shifts. This seems like a perfect solution. You're not making everyone switch to 12s, and you're offering an option to improve work-life balance for those willing to change.

Why don't you give us call to see how this might work for your organization? We can show you a few different options with all 8-hour shifts as well as a few options with both 8 and 12-hour shifts. Click on this link and fill out the form to get started:  Request Quote

My latest client was a Fire Chief who was facing pressure from city management to change from a 24-hour schedule (48/96) to an 8-hour schedule. I assume that the city officials mistakenly believed that 8-hour schedules don't have any overtime in them. Like many public agencies, they think all overtime is bad and should be eliminated. 

I started by showing the Chief what the current schedule looked like on a spreadsheet. It's a 6-week pattern with 6 teams working an average of 56 hours a week. The only way to get rid of the overtime is to add more staff. Shall I repeat that? The ONLY WAY to get rid of the overtime is by hiring more staff. Not changing the shift length. Not changing the work pattern. MORE EMPLOYEES is the only way.

With his coverage requirements (4 people at all times), the current schedule required 12 employees. By increasing the staff to 16, they could lower the average hours worked to 42 hours/week. It didn't matter whether they used 8-hour, 12-hour, or 24-hour shifts. All three approaches (with the exception of 8-hour fixed shifts, which would require 18 people) would need 16 employees averaging 42 hours a week.

What the city folks should have asked was:

1. Would adding 4 more employees cost less than the current approach (12 employees at 56 hours/week vs. 16 employees at 42 hours/week)?
   
   
2. And, if it is, is it worth disrupting the workforce and causing numerous personnel issues?

Overtime is really a substitute for staffing. In 24/7 operations, a little overtime can save a bundle. In this city's case, the answer is not so clear. However, the belief that changing to a different shift length would eliminate the overtime is not accurate. The only way to lower the overtime would be to hire more staff. 

When managers decide to change their group's work schedule, they often begin by searching the internet for: (1) schedules using a specific shift length such as 10 or 12-hour shifts, or (2) popular work patterns such as 4-on-2-off or the Pitman. Unfortunately, doing this will rarely result in the best choice for their unique situation. Here are a few examples of the pitfalls:

• Picking 10-hour or 12-hour shifts when the workload varies in 8-hour increments.
• Using a schedule with constant coverage when their workload varies from shift-to-shift.
• Selecting a schedule pattern (e.g., 4-on-2-off) that requires 6 people per shift, when they have something else.
• Picking a schedule that requires 18 people when other options only require 16.
• Adopting a schedule that is great for day shift, but terrible for night shift.

I'm sure there are plenty of other possibilities, but you get the idea. Many people forget that the primary purpose of the schedule is to match the coverage with the workload. To achieve that goal, you need to start with the number of people needed at different times of the day throughout the week. In many cases, this will limit which shift lengths are feasible. You can read more about that here (Shift Length Selection (shift-schedule-design.com). 

Once you have the shift length(s) established, you need to find or create a pattern that will produce the desired coverage with minimal resources and with maximum weekends off. There is no way that an internet search will ever help with that. 

What do most people do? They find a schedule or create one that they think looks good, adopt it, and live with a mediocre solution, never aware that other approaches or work patterns would have been far superior. They avoid hiring a scheduling expert to save a few hundred dollars and end up costing the organization more than that every week because they got a solution for free. 

Wouldn't it be better to have someone with scheduing expertise go over your situation, show you alternative approaches (e.g., 8-hour fixed shifts vs. combined 8 and 12-hour fixed shifts), and lay out a few different work patterns for each approach? Since the options would all be in the same format, they would be easy to compare and evaluate. You could show them to your workers and let them debate the pros and cons of each option. This is way scheduling should be done.

Click on this link and fill out the form to get started today: (Request a quote for custom schedule design (shift-schedule-design.com)

“Work-life balance” is largely a desire for more time off from work. That’s why so many employees want to change their work schedules. They want more days off and, for jobs that require Saturday and/or Sunday work, more full weekends off. In facilities that run 24/7, this often leads to a search for a schedule using 10 or 12-hour shifts, or a work pattern with less than 40 hours of work per week. Even though this means longer days of work or reduced compensation, many employees feel the extra time off is worth it.

Unfortunately, this can be in direct conflict with the common employer goal of maximizing employee utilization. For work schedules, this means achieving maximum coverage for the lowest possible cost. In 24/7 operations, “lowest cost” often requires keeping the headcount as low as possible and adopting a schedule that averages 42 hours a week (Why Eliminating Overtime in 24/7 Schedules Can Be Costly).

Thus, when it comes to choosing the best work schedule, management and the workers have different goals. Employees focus on the time off. Managers focus on minimizing headcount and cost. So, how do you strike a balance between these opposing points of view?

If you start from the employee perspective, you could end up with something that the employer just can’t afford. A good example is a company that works 24/7 and has a relatively steady workload. The employees want to change from 8-hour shifts to 10-hour shifts. This would require the company to hire 25% more staff (10 hour shifts). For most companies, this is clearly infeasible.

But, if you ignore what the employees want, you risk having high turnover, increased absences, and reduced productivity. As Mike Michalko recently commented on my website, “Too little emphasis on the employee leads to turnover and the high costs associated with onboarding and training. This is aggravated with needed positions in a highly competitive job market. If an employer doesn't address employee satisfaction, they'll end up training someone else's workforce.”

So, where do you start? I think it’s important to reflect on the reason you have a schedule in the first place. Most people think of the schedule as an on-off work pattern for a specific shift length, for example, a 5-on-3-off pattern for 8-hour shifts or a 2-3-2 pattern for 12-hour shifts. While it's true that the shift length and work pattern are essential components of the schedule, they don’t explain why the schedule is needed. 

 
The real purpose of the schedule is to ensure proper coverage:  the right number of people with the right skills at the right time and place. If the coverage isn’t adequate or matched to regular variations in the workload, the group won’t be able to provide the amount or quality of product/service expected by its customers. The schedule ensures that the organization effectively fulfills its purpose of satisfying the needs of its customers.

Therefore, the top priority for the schedule must be to maintain a level of coverage that matches customer demand. In most cases, more than one approach (usually different shift lengths) is possible. I’ve previously discussed how the hours of operation and the workload variability dictate the best choice of shift length(s):  (Shift Length Selection).

As an example, consider a company that operates 24/7 and needs 2 people working at all times. They first have to decide whether to use fixed shifts and rotating shifts. As a general rule, employees prefer fixed shifts whereas employers prefer rotating shifts (Fixed shifts vs. rotating shifts). In this example, we’ll assume they choose fixed shifts. Next, they have a choice between 8-hour shifts or 12-hour shifts. The 8-hour fixed shifts will require 9 employees working an average of 37.3 hours a week, whereas the 12-hour fixed shifts will require 8 employees averaging 42 hours a week. They decide to narrow the search to these two approaches.

For each approach, several different work patterns are possible. These patterns will vary in terms of the number of consecutive days of work and the nature of the days off. In general, the longer the blocks of work days, the longer the blocks of days off and the longer the weekends off.

Once the alternative patterns are developed, the company should involve the employees who will be working the schedule (Strategic Schedulers Enjoy Remarkable Success). The workers must choose between longer days of work more time off. They also must choose between longer blocks of work days and longer blocks of days off. The majority will decide how important work-life balance is and what sacrifices they are willing to make to achieve it.

To summarize, these are the recommended steps in changing employee work schedules:

1.       Establish the organization’s coverage requirements by time of day and by day of the week. Do you need the same number of people all day long? Maybe there is less work during the nighttime. Do you need the same number of people throughout the week? Maybe there is less work during the weekends. Here’s an example for a company that works 24/7:

2.       Identify different approaches (usually two different shift lengths) that will efficiently achieve the organization’s coverage requirements. The hours of operation and regular workload variations will play a key role in this step. Approaches that are highly inefficient will not be considered, e.g., unnecessary double coverage or excessive staffing requirements.

3.       Find alternative work patterns for each approach. Alternatives will vary the number of consecutive days of work, which will affect the amount and the nature of the time off.

4.       Involve employees in the review of all the options and final selection of the schedule. This gives them the opportunity to decide whether the improved time off is worth the (a) longer days of work, (b) more consecutive days of work, and/or (c) the average weekly hours of work.

Although work-life balance is not the starting point when changing work schedules, it is addressed by identifying different approaches/patterns that satisfy the coverage requirements, and then allowing employees to review, discuss, and vote on their preferred option. Shift Schedule Design can help you find the best approaches and associated work patterns. Please click on the link below to get started:

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Main Street businesses face three major challenges when it comes to scheduling their employees:

• Coverage, i.e. matching the number of people at work with a workload that varies by time of day and day of the week.
  
  
• Staffing, i.e. figuring out the best mix of full-time and part-time employees.
   
• Weekends, i.e. alternating the weekend work, so that employees don't have to work every weekend (unless they want to, of course).

Managers don't have time to devote much attention to these challenges. They're too busy running the business and handling all the daily problems. They don't realize they're: (1) spending more than necessary for staffing, (2) irritating customers with slow response times, and (3) frustrating employees who want more weekends off.

Let's take a closer look at each of these challenges.

Variable Workloads

The primary purpose of the employee work schedule is to align the coverage with the workload. In other words, to match the number of people at work with the volume of work at that particular time. During busy periods, more employees should be scheduled to work; when it's slow; fewer people should be scheduled.

Some businesses can control the workload by making appointments with customers (e.g., doctors, dentists, and vets). Most businesses can't do that. They have workloads that vary by time of day and/or by day of the week, often in a fairly predictable manner. For many companies, late afternoons and early evenings (when their customers get off work) are busy times. For others, it's the weekends. The ideal schedule will reflect these changes in demand.

Few businesses keep data on customer volumes on an hourly basis, so they have to rely on more subjective feelings about the workload over broad periods of time. Here's an example. A local hardware store thinks the busy times are first thing in the morning (contractors), evenings, and weekends. They created a table showing the coverage requirements throughout the week as shown below:

Any business with a variable workload should put together a coverage table like this one. This table then becomes the target for the schedule. You can read more about the steps to create an effective work schedule for a variable workload here:  https://www.shift-schedule-design.com/81.html.

Staffing

Small businesses often employ both full-time and part-time employees. Full-time employees will want benefits like paid holidays, vacations, sick time, health insurance, and maybe 401Ks. They also want 40 hours of pay every week, which can be difficult to achieve if the shifts are shorter than 8 hours. Part-time employees are less expensive and sometimes more flexible. They are open to working short shifts and odd shifts throughout the week. However, finding and maintaining good, dependable part-time workers can be a tough, time-consuming job.

Many years ago, I owned an independent video store. We had 3 full-time people and a number of part-time people who were mostly students. The full-time employees worked a fairly permanent schedule, usually an 8-hour shift (9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.). The part-time people did the closing shift (4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.) and most of the weekend work. We scheduled them around their availability due to class schedules and other commitments. We overlapped the shifts in the evening because that was the busiest time of day. Friday and Saturday were the busiest days of the week, so we would schedule the most staff to work on those days, especially during the evenings.

Many part-time employees can only work weekends or certain days of the week because they are students or it's their second job. If these part-time employees are highly valued and/or hard to replace, the business must plan around their availability. This can make the schedule design for the full-time employees much more difficult.

Weekends

Most businesses schedule their full-time employees to a single shift on the same 5 days every week. If the business is open on weekends, some of the employees may have to work every weekend as shown below:

In this example, Employee A works Wed-Sun every week, Employee B works every Fri-Tue, and Employee C works every Mon-Thu. Employees A and B work every weekend, while Employee C gets every weekend off.

Most full-time employees want to avoid or minimize the number of weekend days they have to work. When a business is open one or more weekend days, they should consider schedules that provide occasional weekends off. This is done by creating a schedule with rotating days of work. Let's revise the schedule above to rotate the days of work and the weekends off.

This is a 3-week schedule. Employee A begins the schedule in Week 1, Employee B begins in Week 2, and Employee C begins in Week 3. After finishing the initial week, they all rotate to the next week of the schedule. Emp. A moves to Week 2, Emp. B moves to Week 3, and Emp. C moves to Week 1. With this pattern, all 3 employees get a 3-day weekend off once every 3 weeks. Unlike the previous schedule with fixed days of work, they would share equally in the number of weekends worked (and the number of weekends off).

Summary

Many Main Street businesses are now open more than 8 hours a day and more than 5 days a week. This can make it difficult to create a work schedule for the employees. The three biggest scheduling challenges are: (1) matching the coverage with a workload that varies throughout the day and the week, (2) juggling the mix of full-time and part-time employees, and (3) alternating the weekend work so it is more fairly distributed.

We showed how creating a coverage table becomes the basis for the schedule. This will help you decide the best mix of shift lengths and the number of people to put on each shift. You want to have the right number of people at work to handle the volume of work expected for that particular time period. You don't want to have a bunch of employees standing around with nothing to do either.

The staffing mix depends on the quality and availability of full-time and part-time employees. If good part-time employees are easy to find, the schedule design can start with the full-time people. Part-time people would be used to fill the gaps in the coverage, to work shifts shorter than 8 hours, and/or to cover a lot of the weekend shifts. If you can only find a few, key part-time workers, you may be forced to design the schedule around their availability.

Full-time employees prefer to have weekend days off. You may not be able to give them every weekend off, but you can alternate the weekend work. This requires a schedule with rotating days of work. Although employees tend to prefer fixed days of work (so their days off are predictable), you'll have to explain the need for rotating days of work so that everyone is treated equally in terms of weekends off.

We've written several articles about schedules for companies that operate on a less than 24/7 basis. You might want to check these out.

• https://www.shift-schedule-design.com/Blog?m8:post=work-schedules-for-businesses-open-more-than-8-hours-day-or-5-days-week
  
  
• https://www.shift-schedule-design.com/Blog?m8:post=employee-work-schedules-for-retail-and-service-businesses
  
  
• https://www.shift-schedule-design.com/Blog?m8:post=schedules-in-the-hospitality-industry 
  
  
• https://www.shift-schedule-design.com/Blog?m8:post=restaurant-work-schedules
  
  
• https://www.shift-schedule-design.com/Blog?m8:post=car-dealership-schedules

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Today, we're going to look at employee work schedules at a car dealership. The manager of this dealership runs the sales department 7 days a week for 12 hours a day (8 a.m. to 8 p.m.). He runs the parts department, service writers, and mechanics for 10 hours a day (8 a.m. to 6 p.m.) on Mon-Fri, but wants to add Saturday. He doesn't need a schedule for the administrative staff since they work 8 hours a day Mon-Fri.

Like many dealers, he hasn't kept data on the volume of customers by time of day or day of the week. He says the volume fluctuates too much, though it's always busier on weekends. He wants at least 2 salespeople during the week and 3 or 4 salespeople on the weekends. For parts and service writing, he wants 2 people Mon-Sat. For mechanics, he wants 6 people Mon-Sat.

Salespeople
The current schedule for the sales people consists of fixed 8-hour shifts with fixed days of work. Eight salespeople needed to do this: four on days (Employees A, B, C, and D) and four on afternoons (Employees E, F, G, and H). The schedule is shown below. Employee A works the day shift (d8) from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. every Saturday through Wednesday, Employee B works the day shift Thursday through Monday, and Employee F works the afternoon shift (a8) from 12 noon to 8 p.m. every Thursday through Monday.

The resulting coverage is shown above. It produces higher coverage on the weekends, but it has a 4-hour overlap that is unnecessary. If 12pm to 4pm was a particularly busy period, the overlap would be great. But this isn't a particularly busy time of the day for sales. 

Do the employees like this schedule? Well, they like working the same shift and the same days all the time, but they hate never getting a weekend off.
 

We were able to convince the manager that 12-hour shifts would be a better choice. Here's the schedule we designed.
 

With this schedule, all the employees are on the same shift, but they work different days each week. This is called a fixed shift schedule with rotating days of work. Each employee starts in the week shown. After finishing this initial week, they rotate to the next week of the schedule. Employee A moves from Week 1 to Week 2, B moves from Week 2 to Week 3, and so on. Employee G moves from Week 7 up to Week 1. All the sales people would work the same 7-week pattern. It's just that they would be in different weeks of that pattern.
 

Unlike the current schedule with 8 salespeople, only 7 salespeople are needed with the 12s. The coverage is better too. The 4 hours of overlapping shifts is eliminated and they would have 5 people working both Saturday and Sunday instead of 4 people. The employees should be happier as well. They would get 2 weekends off every 7 weeks (weeks 3 and 6 of the schedule). There are also two 4-day breaks (Weeks 1 and 7) and one 7-day break (Week 5 into Week 6). 

Parts, Service Writers, Mechanics
The current schedule for these three positions is Monday to Friday for 10 hours a day (8 a.m. to 6 p.m.). The manager organized them into 3 teams, with each team consisting of 1 Parts Person, 1 Service Writer, and 3 Mechanics.

Team A worked the 10-hour shift Tue-Fri, Team B worked it Mon-Thu, and Team C worked it Mon-Tue and Thu-Fri. The biggest problem was that all 3 teams worked every Tuesday and Thursday - which are not busy days. Employees liked the schedule, though Team C complained that they didn't get a 3-day weekend off like the other teams did.

We created a new schedule for Mon-Sat coverage with rotating days of work so that the employees wouldn't get stuck working every single weekend. Here's what we designed.

Without adding any staff, we rearranged the pattern so 2 teams were working every day from Mon-Sat. The only sacrifice was one 50-hour work week and one 30-hour work week. This could be resolved by moving the Tue shift in Week 1 to Week 3, however, that would leave the Mon shift in Week 1 sitting out there all by itself. This is poor scheduling because it encourages employees to call in sick or take vacation on that day to bridge the time off before and after that day.
 

The advantages of this new schedule are that it uses the same number of employees, but adds Saturdays and gets rid of the extra coverage on Tue and Thu. The manager was extremely pleased with this, since he got what he wanted for a small price – the overtime for one team every week (though this was offset partially by the 30-hour Week 3).
 

The employees didn't like the idea of rotating and working Saturdays, but they did like getting a 6-day weekend off every 3 weeks.

Conclusions

Sometimes it helps to have an outsider take a fresh look at your business, and especially your employee work schedule. The manager of this dealership would have lived with ineffective schedules and incurred unnecessary costs for years if he hadn't decided to expand the coverage to include Saturdays and contacted us for assistance.

We showed him how to improve the sales coverage and to do it with fewer people. We showed him how to add Saturday coverage for Parts, Service Writers, and Mechanics without adding more staff. In most cases, the employees were happy with the changes. They resisted the change to schedules that rotated the days of work, but they liked the longer breaks and opportunities for weekends off.