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July 18, 2012

Humanity Tutorial: How Do I Ensure 24/7 Coverage with 12-hour Recurring Shifts Between Three Employees?

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Here at Humanity, we want to accommodate all your scheduling needs, including coordinating 24/7 scheduling coverage. Our online scheduling software makes creating recurring or overnight shifts a breeze. The flexible date field supports multi-day shifts and makes overnight shifts easier than ever – which makes scheduling 24/7 coverage quick and simple. By setting recurring shifts, your scheduling process is shortened, saving you great amounts of time and money.

One popular scheduling constraint is 12-hour shifts, between three employees, for example. To set a schedule that rotates three employees over 12-hour shifts, you first need to create the shifts. Click on the desired date and type in the 12-hour time period for the shift, such as “8am-8pm”.
 
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Now, you need to change these shifts to recurring shifts so they repeat daily. Click on the shift to open the shift window. In this shift window, you can assign staff to any given shift, click on a shift and check the employee(s).
 
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To repeat the shift, click the ‘Never Repeats’ button to open the ‘Repeat Shift’ window, shown below.
 
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Select ‘Daily’ from the dropdown menu (to make the shift time repeat each day), the end date and whether you would like to repeat the shift with or without the associated employees. Press ‘Set to Repeat!’ and your schedule will refresh, showing the repeated shifts.

If you repeat this process for the alternative 12-hour shift (8pm-8am), you will have a total of 14 shifts for the week, which is the smallest number of shifts for full 24/7 coverage based on 12-hour shifts.
 
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In order to get the most fair schedule between three employees, if one employee works each shift, the 14 shifts need to be divided in the following manner: five shifts for employee #1, five shifts for employee #2 and four shifts for employee #3. This works out to be 60 hours, 60 hours and 48 hours, respectively, for the week. Employee hours will even out over three weeks, as each week a different employee will take four shifts as opposed to five shifts.

When the shifts are created, managers can either run the scheduling wizard to randomly assign an employee to each shift, or manually assign employees to each shift.

The Humanity team and hardworking Wizard hopes that our recurring shift feature makes 24/7 coverage easier, faster and automatic. Once your recurring shifts are set up, the process should be seamless and headache free! 
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