September 2020

In this article, we will explore the challenges of shift-based work and what we can do to make it better for employees and businesses. Surprisingly, the majority of the US workforce is hourly. In the US, 58.3% of workers or 80.4 million people are hourly workers. If your organization requires 24-hour operations like police officers, firefighters, nurses, and transportation workers this can involve some pretty irregular shifts. Other businesses that are open for long hours like restaurants, grocery stores, etc. can also have odd schedules.

Of those hourly workers, 15 million Americans or 19% work irregular schedules. Employees are not working these irregular schedules by choice; the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that employees work alternate shifts 51% of the time because its that nature of the job and another 13% due to employer mandates. Working abnormal shifts for long periods can have many adverse effects.

• Work Impacts
  • Degraded Performance
  • Higher Accident rates
  • Higher turnover rates (average tenure of restaurant staff is one mo and 26 days!!!)
• Health Impacts
  • Sleep pattern disruption
  • Mental health issues
  • Increased Mortality Risk (11% greater for all causes of mortality)
• Life Impacts
  • No regular family schedules
  • Inability to schedule things like classes to further careers

If working irregular shifts is bad for you, then why do so many 9 to 5 workers benefit from schedule flexibility so they can avoid traffic, handle special events, and just be there for their kids? I believe giving employees some choice so they can manage their lives more effectively makes all the difference.

How can managers give employees more choices? Managers already face many challenges:

1. Predicting Staffing Needs
   • Understaffing – Can cause poor customer service, exploding overtime costs, and stressed-out employees.
   • Overstaffing – Wastes money and often disappoints employees that get sent home.
2. Satisfying everyone’s schedule preferences
3. Creating, distributing, and keeping schedules current
4. Handling last-minute changes caused by absences or increased demand.
5. Dealing with and reducing staff turnover

The old way of scheduling, by having a manager create a weekly schedule manually makes it difficult to overcome these problems. What do employees want from their schedules:

1. Choice and flexibility to express what they want and choose the best options for them.
2. Fairness and transparency so employees understand shifts available to them and why.
3. Predictable schedules for longer periods (more than a week) with more advanced notice so employees can make plans around work.
4. Employees don’t want back-to-back shifts, on-call scheduling, or too few hours to make a living.

Scheduling is fundamentally a dynamic situation that managers and employees need tools like ShiftX to schedule effectively. Instead of managers trying to pick schedules for employees:

1. Publish a Bid: Managers create a bid by entering needed shifts or importing shift predictions based on past data.
2. Select Preferences: Employees select their top shift preferences.
3. Execute Bid: Employees bid on shifts based on a priority order that could be tenure based, performance-based, attendance-based, rotating, etc. Everyone clearly understands their priority and can see what more senior employees have selected to make their best choices. The bidding process gives employees choice, transparency, and fairness. Employees can choose to live bid or let the system bid for them based on their preferences.
4. Distribute Schedules: Schedules are automatically distributed, and notifications help keep everyone on time.

When things happen, you need self-service, automated ways of handling them. Services like:

• Shift Swap: Self-service shift swapping trusts employees to cover shifts in a controlled way. Managers can enforce rules for before shift blackout times, overtime, skill matching, and automatic approval.
• Absence Requests: Self-service absence requests allow employees to report absences quickly, understand consequences, and managers to more quickly cover shifts.
• Open Shift Optimization: When those open shifts happen, open shift optimization creates consistent, desirable shifts that reduce overtime needs.
• Overtime Optimization: Employees can express interest in overtime, define their availability, and bid on overtime when it becomes available. Managers can easily post shifts and get them covered more quickly.
• Check In/Out: Self-service check in and out allows managers to know when employees are at a location and on their shift.

The ShiftX platform has modules covering all of these services using cloud-native and mobile-native technologies.  Check ShiftX out at shiftx.ai.

ShiftX Smart Scheduling Platform