Police Scheduling - A Unique Challenge

How can I find or figure out a schedule that works for my agency? 

This is, of course, the $64,000 question when it comes to scheduling in a 24/7 environment, and, unfortunately, there is no “one-size-fits-all” answer.  Finding the right schedule for your agency is a matter of making a series of informed tradeoffs based on a large number of factors.

This posting and many future postings will examine the tradeoffs involved in finding a schedule that works for you.   Among the factors that you need to consider are: 

• Who are you most concerned about keeping happy, your employees or your city’s budget office?

Ideally, you would come up with a schedule that will make everyone happy.   That may be possible, but there is almost certainly going to have to be some sort of compromise between the budget and employee morale.   It is important to decide up front what the limits are on the budgetary side so that you can know how far you can go when considering other factors.

• What are your coverage goals?

It is always better to figure out what you are hoping to accomplish, rather than try a bunch of schedules and see what you get.  You can base your coverage goals on a wide variety of factors, both quantitative and qualitative.  For example, if you have calls-for-service data that shows when your officers are busiest responding to calls, you can decide to provide more coverage during busy times and less coverage during quiet times. If you think that you need high visibility on the street during certain hours or on certain days of the week, then you can consider this when establishing coverage goals.

• How “fair” do you want the schedule to be, and what is your definition of “fair”? 

Most agencies strive to be fair to their employees, but not everyone agrees on what it means to be fair.  For example, is it fair that employees with more seniority get better schedules than new hires?  Does being fair mean that everyone gets a chance to have weekends off from time to time?  Does being fair mean that everyone moves from shift to shift periodically?  Sometimes, being completely evenhanded and fair requires the agency to sacrifice its coverage goals or has a negative impact on the budget.  Sometimes, you can make your employees’ lives overly complicated by too frequent shift rotations or day-off rotations.

• How do you like to handle training?    

Training consumes valuable work hours that cannot be allocated to day-to-day duties of your employees. Every scheduling process should consider how training will impact staffing levels.  Conversely, every scheduling process should consider how maintaining minimum staffing levels will impact your ability to train, particularly when you are trying to train large groups of employees.

• How long a day can you tolerate?

There is constant debate about the merits and demerits of a 12 hour workday.  Each agency has to decide how long is too long when it comes to setting the length of your employees’ work day.   Some agencies believe that 12 hours is too long for an employee to function at peak levels. Others believe the same about 10 hour shifts.  On the other hand, some agencies routinely schedule all or some of their employees to work double 8-hour shifts.  In order to save yourself a lot of wasted time while developing a schedule, it is better to decide up front what your maximum hours per work day will be.

This is only the beginning. There are numerous other factors that will be identified in future
posts.  Once I’ve summarized the different factors, I will start exploring each one in detail.   I will also be posting analysis of various schedules that we have seen or developed, showing how the various factors are weighed against one another.

Please feel free to post comments if there is something you want me to cover or if you have reactions to what I’ve posted.

 Stay tuned…