What is a Shiftwork Operation?

For the purposes of this blog, I am going to define shiftwork as any work schedule that calls for employees to work outside of the normal Monday through Friday day pattern.

To take a look at the types of schedules that are out there, I will start with a fictitious company that is growing beyond its Monday through Friday schedule.

Our company started small, using only a few employees to cover the work needed.  As business grew, so did the size of the workforce.  A company that is very successful will find that it has to expand both its capital holdings as well as the number of employees it takes to utilize that capital.

Soon, the company is faced with a decision.  All of their equipment is fully staffed.  To expand operations, they will need to add more capital, an expensive proposition, or try to get more out of the capital they have.  Eventually, they decide to go to a 2-shift operation.  This means they have a full crew working from 7:00 am to 3:00 pm and a second crew working from 3:00 pm to 11:00 pm.  Both crews still work Monday through Friday.

The result is they have doubled the capacity of the facility without adding equipment.  The value of this often is related to the cost of equipment versus the cost of labor.

The company continues to grow and eventually it adds a third crew that works from 11:00 pm until 7:00 am. 

Since all crews work 8-hour shifts, Monday through Friday, each crew is providing 40 hours of coverage for a total weekly coverage of 120 hours.

As the company continues to grow, it is faced with another hard choice.  Should they add another crew or should they add equipment.  There is a third choice, one that is used more often than not.  This choice is to use overtime.  They essentially ask the workforce to work more than 40 hours a week.  There are some advantages and disadvantages to this which will be covered in a later blog.

Continued grow will begin to drive weekend overtime up to unacceptable levels.  Quality, retention and safety will all start to be affected.

Eventually, the company adds a 4th crew.  This is a bigger step than those experienced when they added crews in the past.  Before, where to put the crew was obvious.  Now, there is only the weekend.  If you put the 4th crew on a weekend, they will have to work 48 hours in a row (Do not confuse this with a Weekend Warrior Crew which will be covered in a later blog). 

Since a 48-hour shift is unreasonable, they actually have to create an entirely new shiftwork structure that spreads all 4 crews across all of the hours in the week.  This means that all employees are affected.  It also means that many of the support departments are drawn into the change.  For example, a maintenance department that relied on weekend downtime to do their job will now have to look for other opportunities.  

Policies will have to be changed as well.

The last place companies go to for more hours is the holidays.  They will start out working only the less popular holidays and grow into working Christmas and New Year's.

So there you have it.  That's how many companies get from here to there.  Clearly, there are many exceptions to this scenario.  Many operations, such as oil refineries, are continuous and therefore created as around-the-clock operations right from the start.  Others can shutdown but don't simply because of high start up and shut down costs.  Instead, they throttle back on the average rate of production, intentionally causing the work to be spread across all hours in a week.

Whatever the situation; however you got to "there" from "here".  If you have a shiftwork operation, you have shiftwork issues - chief among them are the shift workers themselves.

Jim