Is your business open more than 8 hours a day or more than 5 days a week? If so, do you have a set schedule for your employees, or are you creating a new schedule every week based on individual employee availability and preferences? A set schedule will benefit both you and your employees.

• You won't have to spend so much time creating new schedules.
• You won't have to struggle with being short-handed because you couldn't fill a time slot (i.e. a shift).
• Employees will appreciate knowing far in advance when they have to work and, more importantly, when they will be off.
• Employees like getting occasional weekends off (as opposed to having to work every Saturday, for example).

Unlike 24/7 schedules, free examples of schedules for your type of business are hard to find because there are too many possibilities: 

• Different hours of operation.
• Different coverage requirements.
• Different number of employees.
• Different mix of full-time and part-time employees.
• Different pay weeks.

What do schedules for less than 24/7 coverage look like? Well, that depends on all of the above variables. Here are 2 simple examples:

Example #1. Open 10 hours a day all week. Need at least 2-person coverage at all times. Busiest day is Monday. 4 full-time staff. Pay week begins on Thursday.

Each crew (A and B) has 2 employees working a 10-hour day shift (D10). Crew A begins the schedule in Week 1; Crew B begins in Week 2. After finishing the initial week, they rotate to the next week of the schedule. Crew A rotates to Week 2, while Crew B rotates to Week 1. They continue this 2-week pattern indefinitely. Note that Monday is the only day of the week with two D10s underneath it. That means both crews are scheduled to work on this busiest day of the week. Note that the schedule begins on Thu. Had we started with a different day, the 2-day break in Week 2 might not have fallen on the weekend (Sat & Sun).

Example #2. Open 14 hours a day (7 a.m. to 9 p.m.) on Mon-Sat. Need at least 1-person coverage at all times. Need 2-person coverage from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. 2 full-time staff and 2 part-time staff. Pay week begins on Saturday.
 

The two full-time employees (A & B) work a 2-week schedule on a 12-hour day shift (D12) that runs from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Employee A begins in Week 1, while Employee B begins in Week 2 of the schedule. After finishing the initial week, they rotate the the next week. Employee A rotates to Week 2 and Employee B rotates to Week 1. The two part-time employees (C & D) do not rotate. They work the same 3 days each week. C works a 5-hour afternoon shift (a5) from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Thu, Fri, and Sat. D works the same shift Mon, Tue, and Wed. The 5-hour shift overlaps the 12-hour shift from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. giving the company the 2-person coverage they are looking for.
 

We could keep going, but unless you happen to have the same combination of hours, coverage requirements, staff size/composition, and pay week, additional examples aren't going to be much help. So what's the best approach for creating a schedule? You can contact us for help (Request Quote) or you can follow the steps that we do (Employee Work Schedules).