Most people think of work schedules as merely an on-off pattern for a specific shift length, for example, a 5-on-2-off pattern for 8-hour shifts or a 2-3-2 pattern for 12-hour shifts. While it's true that the work pattern and shift length are essential components of the schedule, they are not necessarily the most important and definitely not the best place to start the search for a new schedule. What? How can I say that? Let me explain.

When people search for a new schedule, they often forget about its primary purpose. It's not to give employees 40 hours a week. It's not to give employees more days off each week or more weekends off. No. The schedule is there to make sure the organization always has the right number of people at work. Let me re-emphasize that point:  the primary purpose of the schedule is to match the coverage with the workload.

In smaller organizations where the workload isn't constant (e.g., it's  lower at night or on the weekends), it's critical to schedule more employees to work when it's busy and fewer employees to work when it's slow. I can't tell you how many times I've had inquiries in which the person says they need 3 people for 16 hours and 1 person for 8-hours a day, but they wanted to change to 10 or 12-hour shifts. When I try to explain that these longer shifts don't match their workload distribution, they get indignant and say something like, "The employees are unhappy with the current schedule, so we're looking for a schedule that will give them more days off. If you can't help us, we'll find someone who can."

This may not be an issue for large companies that have a steady workload around the clock. But with smaller organizations (less than 50 employees), it's often critical. And it applies to a variety of industries. You'd be surprised to hear the types of businesses that I've recently done schedules for - restaurants, auto dealers, and hair stylists. These are not typical shiftwork operations. Yet they all need to align their staff with the changing volume of work, whether it changes by hour of the day or by day of the week (or both).

Let's take a closer look at a simple example: the mechanics at an auto dealer. Their service department is open 6 days a week (Mon-Sat) from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. (10 hours a day). There were 15 mechanics altogether. The workload is highest on Friday and Saturday. I assigned the staff to 5 crews of 3 each. Here is one of the schedules I came up with:

Here's how it works. Team A is initially assigned to Week 1 of the schedule. They work 10 hours on Monday through Thursday that first week. When that week is done, they drop down to the second week of the schedule. For this second week, they work 10 hours on Wednesday through Saturday. They then begin the 3rd week of the schedule, followed by the 4th and 5th weeks. Once the 5th week has been completed, they go back to Week 1 and start the 5-week pattern over again. All 5 teams are working the same schedule; they are merely in different weeks of that pattern.

The mechanics will naturally be most concerned with the schedule features listed below the schedule. As you can see, they will get one full weekend off every 5 weeks. They will have to work a maximum of 4 consecutive days. They will get 5 days off in a row (Week 1 into Week 2). Several times over the 5-week cycle, they will only get 1-day breaks (Sundays). Although they don't get many weekends off, they do get more days off than they would with an 8-hour schedule.

The manager's primary concern is the coverage that the schedule produces. Three teams (9 mechanics) are scheduled to work Mon-Thu and four teams (12 mechanics) are scheduled to work Fri-Sat. We could have shifted more coverage to the two busy days, but the manager wanted the mechanics to have at least one weekend off. He was not happy with the 5-day break, since that would leave unfinished repairs for too long and the employees might forget what work they had completed in the prior week. To satisfy this concern, I revised the schedule by rearranging the weeks so that the longest break was only 3 days in a row.

The key point of this example is to demonstrate the importance of starting the schedule design by examining the workload and coverage requirements rather than starting with a desired shift length and work pattern. Had we started with a 4-on-3-off pattern, the schedule might have looked like this:

Unlike the previous schedule, the teams don't rotate to a different set of days each week. Instead, they always work the same 4 consecutive days and get the same 3 days off. This is great for Team A, which gets a 3-day weekend off, but not so great for the other four teams that have to work every Saturday. Most people probably would tolerate this because they are getting 3 consecutive days off. The big loser with this schedule is the organization. Although there are sufficient mechanics working on Fri and Sat, there is only one team working every Mon and Tue, and 5 teams every Wed and Thu. No matter how you juggle the weeks or the patterns around, you can't avoid problems with the coverage.

If you start the schedule selection process with a specific work pattern in mind, the resulting schedule may be acceptable to employees but detrimental to the organization. In our example, the organization would have been understaffed 2 days a week and overstaffed 2 days a week. If you start the process with the coverage requirements and use rotating days of work, you can optimize the coverage and give employees a decent schedule that treats everyone equally. In our example, the coverage was perfectly matched to the workload and the employees all get one long weekend off every 5 weeks.