Police Scheduling - A Unique Challenge

The question was posed, “What would you recommend for twelve street officers wanting to work twelve hour shifts, when the city does not want overtime used?”

Fortunately, there is a very straightforward solution to this scheduling problem that highlights some basic principles of 12 hour schedules. The graphic below shows the recommended schedule to address this problem.  We’ll explore some of the key ideas behind it.

1.  Officers are paired off with opposing schedules, i.e., when one officer is
     working, the other is off and vice-versa.
2. Every officer has a designated “Short Day” when he/she works
     only 8 hours instead of 12.
3. Officers are allocated to the two shifts according to need. In this case,
     they are evenly split between the day shift and night shift.  Just be
     sure that when you move officers between shifts you move both officers in a
     pair (see item 1 above).
4. Officers’ short days are spread around the week so that no single day is
     too short during the 4 hours of the shift they are not covering.

The start and end times of the shifts are completely discretionary. Many agencies use 6:00 - 18:00 and 18:00 - 6:00 because this aligns with daily fluctuations in activity, but this varies from agency to agency.  Another thing to keep in mind is that you can schedule the 8 hour short shift for any time during the normal 12 hour shift (beginning, middle or end), depending on your needs.

Much fuss is made over the pros and cons of 12 hour schedules.  Is it possible for police officers to stay alert and effective for 12 straight hours? Does the impact of sick and vacation time get magnified when each lost day is 50% longer?  These questions and many more are relevant and important when considering whether your agency should consider 12 hour shifts.

However, none of that is what I want to talk about in today’s entry. Right now, let’s take a look at the scheduling dynamics of 12 hour shifts and how you can make them work should you decide that they are a good fit for your agency.

What makes 12 hour schedules attractive from a scheduling point of view?  Quite simply, 12 hours fits simply and neatly into the 24 hour day that most law enforcement agencies must cover.  Having two 12 hour shifts is pretty simple and easy.¼br> The other tidy aspect of 12 hour shifts is that you can cover each shift with two alternating squads—i.e., when one squad is working, the other squad is off duty and vice versa.  Thus, you can divide your agency into four squads, two for each shift, thereby maintaining tight cohesion among the officers who typically work together as a team.

Although there are many variations, the following is a typical pattern for a schedule using 12 hour shifts.

Assuming that Day 1 is Monday, this schedule gives each employee two 2-day breaks and a 3-day weekend (Sat/Sun/Mon) every two weeks.  To schedule the two squad that cover each shift, you simply have one squad working the week 1 schedule while the other squad works the week 2 schedule and then continually rotate through the two week sequence.

One drawback to 12 hour schedules is that if you multiply 12 hours by the 7 days each employee works over two weeks, you get 84 hours.  The extra 4 hours every two weeks would force many agencies to pay overtime to every officer every pay period, which could get expensive.  The way to handle this is to have each officer work a short shift once every two
weeks.  In the example above, the officer(s) working this schedule have a short, 8-hour day on Monday.  By spreading the short shift among your officers on different days, you can reduce their work hours to 80 per week with minimal impact on staffing.  Typically, you would schedule the short shift to reduce coverage during periods when you need fewer officers, such as during the middle of the night or during the middle of the day in an area where there
is little activity during those hours.  You can vary the start times of officers who share the same short day in order to fine-tune your coverage each day.

A word of caution.  The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) permits you to establish pay periods up to 28 days for public safety employees.  Thus, you can establish a 14 day pay period over which hours are accumulated to determine if an officer has earned overtime pay.  However,
there are some requirements that are important to consider.  Generally, the FLSA exemption for public safety personnel has been held to apply only to sworn law enforcement officers.  Civilian employees, including non-sworn security personnel, are generally covered by the more restrictive 7 day work week convention for calculating overtime.  Thus, it can be very difficult and expensive to make 12 hour shifts work for non-sworn personnel.

The other FLSA issue to consider is that you must clearly define the length and cycle of your pay periods and you must communicate this information to your employees in writing.  Thus, if you are going to adopt a 12 hour schedule, or any other schedule that requires officers to work more than 40 hours during any given week, you should get professional legal advice to
ensure that you comply with all of the requirements of FLSA.

As we address various scheduling challenges, we will be working with some basic math facts that relate to shift scheduling.
 

First and foremost, there are 168 hours in a week.  If your organization is developing a schedule to provide 24/7 coverage, then this number is critically important, since it is the number of hours you must cover each week.  If your organization does not need to provide 24/7 coverage, then you should calculate the number of “coverage hours” you will be working with.  The formula for coverage hours is as follows.

Weekly Coverage Hours = Daily Coverage Hours   X   Covered Days per Week

Using this formula, if you have to provide 16 hours of coverage for 6 days per week, then your Weekly Coverage Hours = 16  X  6 = 96.

Another critical number to determine is the number of hours each employee will work per week, referred to hereafter as Hours in Workweek.  In many cases, this number is 40, but not always.  Most of the examples in this book will use a 40 hour work week, but the techniques presented here work well even if your employees work a different number of hours per week.

The formula for the number of full-time employees needed to provide one unit of coverage for a full week is Weekly Coverage Hours ÷ Hours in Workweek.  In the case of 7 x 24 coverage, the number of employees required to provide one unit of coverage with a standard, 40 hour week would be 168 ÷ 40 = 4.2 employees.  This formula is useful for assessing how many employees will be needed to meet your coverage goals.

Coverage Goals

The first order of business when developing a shift schedule is to establish your coverage goals.  When we say “coverage goals”, we mean that you should decide how many employees you would like to have working during each of the 168 hours of a typical work week.  Depending on your situation, you might be establishing your coverage goals based on factors such as production requirements or workload.  You may decide how many employee you need based on the number it takes to meet your coverage goals.  In other cases, the number of employees is a fixed number, and the objective of your coverage goals is to make optimal use of the available resources.

You should know from the beginning that it is not very likely that you will find a shift schedule that produces exactly the coverage you want.  The purpose of establishing your coverage goals is to have a baseline against which your various scheduling options can be evaluated.  After all, if you don’t know what you want, it is going to be very hard to know if you have found it.

The following grid shows coverage goals for a hypothetical situation.  Each cell in the grid represents a single hour of a single day of the week.  The number in each cell is the number of employees that the organization would like to have working at that time.  In this example, the organization is trying to make the best use of the 30 employees that it already employs.  In order to cover fluctuations in workload, some hours of the week have more employees working and others have less.

An example of coverage goals for 30 employees working 40 hours per week

 In order to create realistic coverage goals, it is important to know how many total employee work hours you have to work with.  Since we have 30 employees working 40 hours per week, we know that we have 30  X  40 = 1200 hours to allocate across the 168 cells of our grid.  You should be sure that your coverage goals match your available resources by making sure that the sum of the numbers in all cells equals the number of employee work hours you have available.  In this case, the sum of all cells adds up to 1200, which is what we have calculated as our available work hours.