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.