Does this seem like a feasible schedule change?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Due to various circumstances, we’re going to have several positions to fill in the next few months. We’ve gotten a lot of applications from well-qualified people. The problem is, they generally don’t like the schedules that we’re trying to fill, most of which involve working every weekend. So we’re trying to find some way of working out the scheduling so that people put in their full hours every pay period without working every single weekend, while not burning anyone out (it’s very intense, very fast-paced, and generally exhausting) or making it so they go really long stretches without seeing SOs who work day shift, kids, friends, etc.

What I had thought about was a variation on the schedule that our tech supervisors work. They have an alternating schedule so that when one is off the other is on. They work 5-2 on Monday and Tuesday, are off till Friday, work 10-10 on Saturday and Sunday, are off Monday and Tuesday, work 5-2 Wednesday-Friday, are off that weekend, and then start the cycle again. Most people think that’s a shitty schedule because of the weekends–you have to go from being nocturnal to being up in the day, and your friends and family are just barely up when you leave and about done for the day when you come home. Also, because of the specifics of their job description that shift can run up to 20 hours instead of the scheduled 12. But if we made some modifications to the weekend schedule, I think it could work.

If you were doing a 4-4, your sleep cycle would pretty much stay on track, and you could spend time with your friends or family or have a lunch date before work. Then it would just be a matter of tacking three hours onto two shifts every other week, and we’ve all stayed 3 hours late plenty of times. Hasn’t killed anybody yet. (We wouldn’t be the suckers on call, so we wouldn’t be pulling the 20-hour shifts if the shit hits the fan.) The midnight shift would do the same thing, except their hours during the week would be 12-9 and then 10-10 or 11-11 on the weekends. Daytime weekend shifts can be filled with full-timers who don’t mind switching back and forth or want their evenings free, or with part-time people.

So a sample schedule would be: M-T 5p-2a, off W-F, Sa-Su 4-4, off M-T, W-F 5p-2a, off Sa-Su. You get every other weekend off to date or do stuff with your family or gaze at your navel or whatever (and if you do work on the weekend, you’ve still got Friday night), nobody’s ever scheduled more than three days in a row so people aren’t as likely to get burned out, nobody has to go days at a stretch without seeing their friends or family. That seems like a reasonable exchange for working an slightly longer shift two weekends a month.

I’ve been over it and over it in my head, and I can’t really find a downside for anyone. But I still feel like I’ve got to be missing something fairly obvious. So I ask you, does this seem like a feasible schedule change?

2

Oh, and if anyone has any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them. We have to be scheduled at least 72 hours every two-week period. Someone has already suggested going to a week on, week off thing, but that would suck much ass, between the burnout factor and the not seeing your SO/kids for a week at a stretch factor.

3

Maybe I’m, missing something, but I don’t see from your examples how people are getting their full hours. In the sample you described, a person gets 42 hours one week, 27 the next.

Given nine hour shifts on the weekdays and 12 hour shifts on the weekends, there’s no way to get everybody to work 40 hours unless there’s some overlap during the week.

How many people will you have total? How many need to be on at one time? And how many hours a day do you need people working?

4

We only schedule emergency techs 36 hours a week and count that as full time. Since we pretty much never get our federally mandated breaks during our shifts and we’re salaried so we never get overtime, we get paid for our breaks after our shifts. (Also, I think the ER docs feel bad about the clinic owner not being willing to pay us very much, so they try to get us as much leeway timewise as possible.) And yes, there’s going to be overlap. We absolutely need overlap for the volume of work, to allow for transfer of care, etc.

Right now, we have someone who comes in at 4pm every weekday to help the day staff finish up, get rounded on the patients, etc. Three more techs (2 regular, plus a supervisor) come on at 5. We have two more people who come in at midnight. The 4pm person leaves at 1, the rest of the evening shift leaves at 2, and the overnights are there until 9am (the day staff comes back on at 8.) On weekend days we have a tech who comes in at 7am, one at 8 am (a part time person), two at 10 am (a regular tech 10-7, and a supervisor 10-10), two at noon (12-8 and 12-10, both part timers). In the evenings we have two techs who work from 5p-2am (one part-time), another who does 6-3, and then the two midnight folks.

Right now, the setup is for all the full-time people to work four 9-hour shifts on a set schedule, but all of those schedules involve working at least part of every single weekend, which our applicants are grumping about.

5

IANAL and all that, but depending on local law, this could come back to bite you clinic’s owner in the ass some day. Salaried =! no overtime (varies with state laws is my understanding)
My son is a manager for a national chain that supplies stuff for babies. Ends in R-us. Anyway a few months ago, they took him from being exempt (no OT) and started paying all of the managers OT. The reason was that they were afraid of a class action suit for back OT at some point in the future.
Getting back to your scheduling problem, do your overnight people want to work overnight all the time, or do they like seeing the sun once and a while? How the schedule is written kinda depends on this.

6

The midnight folks probably see more daylight than the rest of us, since they stay up after work and sleep in the late afternoon and evening.

But the main thing I was wondering about was whether the 2 on, 3 off, 2 on, 2 off, 3 on, 2 off schedule sounded like something people would go for.

7

My brother has been working a two-on, two-off, three-on, two-off, two-on, three-off kind of schedule for years now. Of course, it’s daytime, but it’s twelve hour shifts. It’s not perfect, but he likes the fact that every other weekend he has three days. And since his wife works evenings they get to spend his days off together. So it works for them. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think what you have is a workable schedule, and some people will likely find that it works okay for them. I think it’s reasonable. People may actually find that it has some advantages once they try it.

8

I think all schedule changes are inherently dangerous, driving wise.