Scheduling Shifts, Days-off and Assignments

A day may be divided in any number of ways for work and non-work activity. Schedule24™ Standard supports any day-on-day-off working pattern, shift duration and description. Shift work has been traditional in law enforcement and manufacturing industries but service industries now increasingly operate on some shift system; for example a restaurant or convenience store will normally each day be open for much longer than a traditional working day.

Shift work is also the norm in governmental and private employment in fields related to public safety and healthcare, such as police, fire prevention, security, emergency response and hospitals. Swing shifts are scheduled for late evening work and the graveyard shift has runs through the early hours of the morning.

In the main these remain the most unpopular shifts due to the unsocial aspects of this kind of work. Shift durations change from time to time with 8 hour durations being extended to 10 hours to facilitate compressed work weeks that allow longer periods of rest and 12 hour shifts will probably remain the longest shift duration for practical purposes.

There are trends to fix shift durations to the time to meet business requirements and may be shorter than the traditional 8 hours on some days but longer on other days of greater demand. Where staff are is required to work weekends or days off in the week shift rotation is usually applied making scheduling more complex especially for manual or paper and pencil scheduling.

Shift scheduling may not be sufficient and information about staff assignments need to be scheduled, certainly staff absences or unavailability that impacts a business capability can be greatly improved with basic schedule management.