Shift Work Opportunity Assessment

There are inherent necessities and considerable business advantages to running your operation at times outside of just the day shift. However, there are also significant downsides and hidden costs that accompany these extended hour operations.

The hidden costs of shiftwork are the result of human physiology and social patterns that are disrupted when employees are asked to work nights, evenings, long, or irregular hours on a regular basis. These social and physiological disruptions are manifested as increased absenteeism, turnover, health care costs, accidents and injuries, and decreased quality and productivity.

Using a deep analysis of key performance indicators, CIRCADIAN can:

  • Evaluate the extent of excess costs due to shiftwork in your operation (help you cut costs in your operation)
  • Identify solutions for reclaiming the excess costs
  • Propose solutions to existing policies and procedures, union agreements and regulations to promote cost savings
  • Determine the ROI for implementing countermeasures to reduce the costs

CIRCADIAN can also help you:

  • Determining the cost benefits of implementing a fatigue risk management system (FRMS) and help with design and imlementation
  • Assess the impact that certain policy changes or schedule changes may have on your operating budget
  • Evaluate your current work schedule and benchmark it against your industry

If you're having an issue with your shift work operation, or you are simply thinking about updating your shift schedules, we'd be happy to put you in touch with one of our shift work experts.

Call us at 781-439-6300

Email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it." style="text-decoration: none;">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Fill out our web contact form

Proportional Staffing

Determining Optimal Staffing Levels

Determining and maintaining optimal staffing and crewing levels is critical to efficiency. Overstaffing is obviously costly -- not just to payroll costs and benefits. It manifests in lackluster performance by under-used employees not fully occupied or engaged by continuous operation. Conversely, understaffing creates excessive overtime, difficulty with relief coverage and training requirements, and dramatic increases in safety risks from fatigue, absenteeism, and even burnout.

If This Is Your Situation:

  • Regularly experience high levels of overtime.
  • Have fluctuating demands with widely changeable production requirements.
  • Have fluctuating demand that varies by the hour of the day, day of the week, week of month, or season.
  • Have employees with lots of idle or downtime.

This Is How CIRCADIAN Can Help You:

Having the proper number of personnel in each unit by skill set as determined over a full range of demand variables is critical to the integrity and efficiency of all entities having proportional staffing needs. Utilization of CIRCADIAN Proportional Staffing technologies can help you to:

  • Minimize unnecessary overtime and reduce wasteful idle time.
  • Cut time lost trying to fill positions that result from unscheduled absences.
  • Schedule vacation and holiday time and minimize overtime.
  • Ensure covering the right number and type of skill positions.

In many industries such as Public Safety (Police, Fire, EMS), Call Centers, and numerous types of production environments, calculating the optimal staffing is complicated by every changing demand that can vary by hour of day, day of week, week of month, season and by other parameters. 

By analyzing historical data and sales and marketing forecasts with CIRCADIAN proprietary algorithms, we find and utilize trends that accurately predict future demand. Our process includes:

  • Calculating the efficiency of the current schedule.  Efficiency is defined as the percentage of time that the client has exactly the right amount of personnel by skill set to perform the required functions.  Alternatively, inefficiency is defined as the percentage of the time that the client has either too many or too few personnel to handle the workload. 

  • Extrapolate projections for unscheduled absences and for emergency requirements from historical data; we factor these into the proportional staffing level calculations.

  • Model what a 100% efficient schedule would look like. Inevitably, completely efficient schedules are not very “employee friendly.” 

  • And the final step entails meshing the completely efficient schedule with employee and management scheduling requirements regarding factors such as length of shift, time of shifts, on/off patterns, number of consecutive shifts to be worked, fixed or rotating shift preferences and the number of hours to be worked per week, month, year, etc.   

  • The algorithm also provides for shift relief factors (by job classification and/or department) to accommodate vacations, holidays, and other scheduled absences.

By incorporating employee preferences with historical trends and forecasts, we can substantially increase schedule efficiency while providing the types of schedules that employees want to work, thus creating a true win-win outcome.

Contact a Shift Scheduling Expert

If you're thinking about expanding your operation to 24/7, or have already expanded and are running into problems, we'd be happy to put you in touch with one of our experts. They can answer your questions and share best practice information.

  • Call us at 781-439-6300 auto-dial
  • Email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Fill out our web contact form.

Additional Resources: 

Expanding to 7-Day Operations

Shift Schedule Support: Expanding/Contracting Hours

CIRCADIAN provides specialized assistance to plan and facilitate 5- to 7-day plant expansions (or any initiatives where the working hours will change). These support services will help you realize the full benefits of the change, and achieve the desired return on investment.

If This Is Your Situation:

  • You run 24/5 but want to reduce forced weekend overtime by implementing a 24/7 schedule.
  • You are investigating the cost benefits of expanding your hours of operation versus the capital expense of more equipment/machinery.
  • You have already determined that you need to expand work hours to 24/7.
  • You are analyzing your staffing levels to determine whether you have the resources to cover 24/7.
  • You are consolidating production lines from one or more plants to maximize efficiency and reduce unit costs.
  • You are rebalancing labor requirements to better align with workload demands.

How CIRCADIAN Can Help Your Operation Expand/Contract:

We provide technical and facilitation support to management, unions, employees, and internal task teams on how to properly plan, develop and implement a new work schedule to meet desired operating hours through a human involvement process, including:

Operational Analysis And Planning

CIRCADIAN consultants review your operating policies, practices, and procedures, as well as labor contracts/employee agreements, to understand your business needs and to identify opportunities and problem areas. This includes assistance with:

  • Assessment, planning, and strategy development.
  • Where to employ 7-day operations in your facility.
  • Determining the business justification.
  • Determining the employee justification.
  • How to present the change and involve the employees in the change process.
  • Resolving the numerous implementation issues.

We guide you through this planning process, challenge assumptions, and provide you with the benefits of our extensive experience. Why reinvent the wheel and expose the operation to avoidable mistakes, unnecessary costs, and potential alienation of the workforce? After 25 years of facilitating these complex changes, we work with you closely to ensure the smoothest possible transition and achieve the optimal 7-day schedule.

Education And Consensus Building

Politically or arbitrarily derived shift schedules are problematic: they adversely affect morale, employee relations, absenteeism, turnover, and plant performance. CIRCADIAN can help you to avoid these problems by achieving consensus between managers, supervisors, union officials and shift workers as to:

  • The business needs for the change.
  • A proven method for determining the best alternative schedule.
  • Involvement of the employees in the selection process.

The best way to accomplish this is to provide scheduling education so that all parties have the same facts. CIRCADIAN provides seminars, training workshops, and diagnostic instruments for just this purpose so that your people can make informed decisions rather than emotional or irrational ones.

Developing And Implementing The Optimal 7-Day Work Schedule

CIRCADIAN serves as a neutral, third-party expert to facilitate a proven process that will yield the optimal work schedule every time. It turns out that the best shift schedules are site-specific phenomena, as each workforce has a unique demographic composition and local culture. As a technical specialist, CIRCADIAN brings the expertise to help both labor and management sort through these issues. Given that we have no vested interest in the outcome, CIRCADIAN is well-positioned to objectively facilitate such joint initiatives and help you achieve win-win resolutions.

Contact A Shift Scheduling Expert

If you're thinking about expanding your operation to 24/7, or have already expanded and are running into problems, we'd be happy to put you in touch with one of our experts. They can answer your questions and share best practice information.

  • Call us at 781-439-6300 auto-dial
  • Email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Fill out our web contact form.

Additional Resources: 

How to Design a Fatigue Risk Management System (FRMS)

How to Design a
Fatigue Risk Management System

CIRCADIAN® has nearly 30 years of experience in developing and implementing fatigue risk management systems (FRMS). An FRMS is a data-driven, risk-informed, safety performance-based proactive program to mitigate the risks of fatigue in 24/7 operations. An FRMS fits within an organization’s overall health and safety program to create a process that will continually monitor and mitigate fatigue risk.

7 Key characteristics of a successful Fatigue Risk Management System

  1. Science based – Supported by established peer-reviewed science
  2. Data driven – Decisions based on collection and objective analysis of data
  3. Cooperative -- Designed together by all stakeholders
  4. Fully Implemented – System-wide use of tools, systems, policies, procedures
  5. Integrated -- Built into the corporate safety & health management systems
  6. Continuously improved – Progressively reduces risk using feedback, evaluation & modification
  7. Owned – Responsibility accepted by senior corporate leadership

Next Step:

Developing a FRMS: The 5 Levels of Defense & Tools You Need

FRMS - 5 Defenses

 Contact one of our experts about fatigue risk mitigation:

 

Interested in Shiftwork, Scheduling & Fatigue Risk Management Best Practices?

Subscribe to CIRCADIAN's email list for cutting-edge information, updated research findings, and easy-to-implement strategies, all tailored to optimize the health, safety, and performance of your shiftwork and extended hours operations.

 

Join our community of 32,000+ industry leaders and receive practical tips and expert insights to optimize your 24/7 workforce.

Find

Main Menu