Do your staffing levels match your workload?

If you don’t know what staffing levels you are trying to match, then you will always be incorrectly staffed. Shifts and Hours tables are the corner stone of shift scheduling. We start off the process of creating a shift schedule with an Hours Table’. It’s simple, along the top are the 24 hours for the day and down the side are the seven days off the week.

This figure is an example of the ‘Hours Table’. In this example the operation requires three people on during core hours Monday-Saturday 8am-4pm. During the rest of the week they require two people at all times. At the end of the table is a count of the total number of hours for each day and the week. In this example these staffing levels would require 384 hours per week.

Such a simple tool, yet from it you can work out the hours you require per week, and hence the number of people you need to employ to operate efficiently.

Then you can compare your required staffing levels with your current staffing levels. Do they match?

We have developed an Excel spreadsheet that allows us to create the shifts and plots them against the desired staffing profile for each day. So with the example where three are required on during core hours and two at all other times, let’s see what shifts would support this profile best. The graph below shows how we match the required staffing numbers to the number supplied by the shifts. Each day would have a different staffing requirement we would have to match. The one below would work for Monday to Saturday in this example. The required number would be entered from the ‘Hours Table’. The Shift Number would be based on the shifts used. This way we can check if the shifts met the requirement. In this example we have matched the requirement.

If you would like to find out more about creating an ‘Hours Table’ then follow this link.

If you would like some help creating a shift schedule then please contact us directly. You can download your own copy of the ‘Hours Forms’ from http://www.visualrota.co.uk/staffingprofile.xlsx This Excel file is for one hour increments, however we also do them in half hour and quarter hour increments too depending upon your workload requirement. Academic organisations often have two sets of Hours Tables, one for Term and one for Vacation Weeks.