The Importance of Pay Weeks

February 15th, 2013 at 5:47 pm star

Few people realize the importance of the pay week when selecting a new shift schedule. Every schedule is designed for a specific pay week, e.g., Sunday's day shift until Saturday's night shift or 0001 Monday morning to 0000 Sunday night.

If you select a schedule that is designed for a pay week different than yours, you could end up with unbalanced work weeks, unnecessary overtime, or loss of weekends off. Let's take a look at a common schedule pattern for 8-hour shifts.

Crew / Week	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun	Hours
A / Week 1	d8	d8	d8	d8	d8	-	-	40
B / Week 2	-	a8	a8	a8	a8	a8	a8	48
C / Week 3	a8	-	-	n8	n8	n8	n8	40
D / Week 4	n8	n8	n8	-	-	d8	d8	40

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

In this schedule, the night shift can be either the first shift of the day or the last shift of the day. You can see that once every four weeks there is a 3-day weekend (Sat, Sun, and Mon). But what happens if your pay week begins on Saturday? Here is the same pattern copied into a pay week that begins on Saturday.

Crew / Week	Sat	Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Hours
A / Week 1	d8	d8	d8	d8	d8	-	-	40
B / Week 2	-	a8	a8	a8	a8	a8	a8	48
C / Week 3	a8	-	-	n8	n8	n8	n8	40
D / Week 4	n8	n8	n8	-	-	d8	d8	40

Now there are no full weekends off. In the second week of the schedule, you would be off Saturday but have to work Sunday. In the third week of the schedule, you would have to work Saturday and then be off on Sunday. With this particular pattern it is possible to modify it to make it work. But that is not always possible.

If you come across a website that shows a number of shift schedule patterns, you'll see that they imply the pay week doesn't matter. For example, here is a quote from one website regarding a similar schedule to this one, ”Day 1 usually starts on a Monday but it can be any day of the week.”

Sure, the pattern is the same. The average hours of work are the same. But you would lose all weekends off. So be very careful if you think you're saving money by copying a schedule off the Internet. You could end up with an inferior schedule and never know how much better things could have been with a schedule that was custom-designed around your requirements.

Posted in Schedule Selection by Bruce Oliver

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