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American Staff Scheduling Each country has its own laws when it comes to operating shifts. So this page is about creating staff schedules for American Organisations. In America, companies have no obligation to give their staff any days of holiday, which includes state holidays. However most do offer between 6-20 days per year depending on length of service etc. A standard working week is 40 hours and the Fair Labour Standards Act states that employees must receive time and a half for all hours worked over the 40 hours in a week. So what would the best America staff schedule look like? Well to avoid the overtime payments for anyone working over 40 hours per week, you would need to use 10-hour shifts. You would then schedule seven consecutive 10-hour shifts over 2 weeks. This would give everyone an average of 33.5 hours per week. And everyone would have 25 weeks off in seven day blocks. During those seven days off the shift workers would need to be available to work off their Banked Hours. Their Banked Hours could be up to 320 hours each per year and would be used to cover for absence, training and ad hoc work, all at basic rate. This is a minimum cost solution, and gives your employees a maximum of 25 weeks off per year with no holiday entitlement. To run this shift pattern you would need a minimum of ten people and provides a minimum of two on duty at all times, 24/7. With 10-hour shifts the important part is of course balancing the start times with the finish times of all of the shifts. Here is an example of a 10-hour shift pattern, holidays included, where there are five shifts; M (Morning Shift), E (Early Shift), D (Day Shift), L (Late Shift) and N (Night Shift). The shift pattern has been set up for one year.

Can you imagine working on this shift schedule? The shifts are all working in nice easy blocks. Lots of good quality time off. Nice long breaks just when you want them. If you also give your staff holidays then these can be either rostered into the shift schedule at the start of the year to create a holidays included shift schedule. Alternatively you would need to use a holiday management plan so that your shift workers could select their holidays and cover could be arranged. With 10-hour shifts you would have to work more weekends than on 12-hour shifts but less than on 8 hours. In a 24/7 operation you would expect to be working on about 60% of weekends. However since on 8-hour shifts you would be working approximately 75% of weekends that’s about 8 extra weekends off per year. One of the main reasons for using 8-hours shifts is that mangers get to observe two shifts per day (Early and Late shift). On 12-hours however, managers would only observe the Day shift. On 10-hour shifts, managers could observe four of the five shifts. Thus 10-hour shifts provide better visibility and control over the operation. If you would like a tailor made shift schedule to adhere to your specific requirements then please contact us.