The roster is not your problem

Wednesday evening, half past seven, the office of the accommodation facility. The plan for next week is done. Qualifications checked, rest periods kept, night shifts shared out, and some thought given to who works well with whom and who had better not. It took a good hour. I was pleased with myself.

Friday, just before six, the phone rings.

That was when it started. Work down the list, half of them do not pick up, the ones who do cannot come. After two hours there was a new plan, which I still had to send out, and on Monday three people asked anyway which one was now valid. That went on for four years, across nine sites, and in all that time I never once worked out what it was costing me.

How much time does shift planning really cost?

In shift-based businesses, planning usually costs two to four hours a week. The written roster makes up the smaller part of that. The larger part comes from absences and replanning, swap requests, follow-up questions and the transfer into payroll, work that nobody schedules and that therefore appears in no estimate.

The hour you remember

When I go through a business today to find where the planning time sits, almost the same order comes out every time. Not to the decimal place, but the ranking holds.

• Absences and replanning. The biggest item by a distance.
• The first roster. Much smaller than nearly everyone assumes.
• Swap requests. Harmless one at a time, less so added up.
• Follow-up questions. „Have you seen the new plan?“ times fifteen.
• Transfer into payroll. The quiet item at the end of the month.

The first roster is the work you remember. You sit down, you do it, you are finished, you tick it off. Absences are not remembered as work but as annoyance, and that is why they almost never show up in your own estimate.

Planned work and interrupting work

The first roster is planned. You decide when you do it. You clear the time, you have the papers in front of you, you are in the subject.

An absence is the opposite. It comes on Friday just before six, it pulls you out of something else, and on top of the phoning itself it costs you the way back into whatever you were doing. Nobody counts that way back. It is there all the same.

Buying planning software at this point makes the first roster faster. The first roster was never the problem.

What actually helps

More can be taken off you in the replanning than most people think. Just not the part you think of first.

• Store the rules once instead of going through them in your head every time. Qualification, rest period, who is allowed at which site, who does not work with whom. Once that is in place, half the thinking in a replan falls away.
• Make availability visible. The most expensive part of an absence is the calls to people who could not have come anyway. Whoever can see in advance who is even an option makes half as many calls.
• Let changes distribute themselves. A changed plan that reaches everybody saves the questions on Monday. Those are an item of their own, even if they do not feel like one.
• Prepare the transfer into payroll. Typing everything out again at the end of the month is the sort of work machines exist for.

The test for your own business

Take a sheet of paper and keep a tally for four weeks. Two columns, nothing more. Plan written and plan changed. A stroke for every change, and the minutes next to it.

After four weeks you can see where you have to start. I never did it back then. Had I done it, I would have saved in the right place for four years.