Thank you all who have responded. I am always amazed on how much detailed information you can gather from this ListServ. I have listed the original post and below are the responses.
I had to make 2 e-mails due to the amount of excellent content to be compliant with the list-serv.
Thank you all again.
(Orginal post)
Our Office is open from 40 hours/wk 8am-5pm M-F, full time employees work 5-8 hour shifts.
I am considering increasing the hours of the Office 50 hours/wk from 6am-7pm M-F, altering and staggering the shifts for FTE to be able to work 4-10 hour shifts.
My questions to the list;
* Has anyone done this before?
* Pros/Cons with this experience?
* How did this effect productivity/revenue in the office?
* What was the policy for holidays, vacation, and personal time off?
Greetings Derrick- my previous employer did 4-10’s over the summer months of June, July, and August and it seemed to work quite well overall. It was a LOT of work to get it set up. I can lay out how we came to it in hopes it will help your decision. I’ll apologize in advance for the length!
First, the planning: We only offered this to our full time technical and full time practitioner staff as we were part of a larger conglomerate health care system and had some limitations (support staff sometimes had to cross departments to work, so it wouldn’t be feasible for them to have a shortened work week). Our practitioners were on call one day of the week every other week (I.E. I was every other Wednesday) and then pretty much every 8 weekends Friday through Monday. This is important as you’ll see when it comes to Friday scheduling.
We first looked for volunteers and an even number of people to participate, as the 7-5:30 schedules didn’t work for everyone (we reduced the lunch break to 30 minutes from the usual 60). We then broke the even number into two groups, 1 and 2. For us, each group had one of our two participating technicians and the balance was the practitioner staff. Here’s the meat of how it worked and for us what made it so attractive to employees: One week, group 1 would work Monday through Thursday while group 2 worked Tuesday through Friday. The next week, the groups would alternate with Group 1 working Tuesday through Friday and group 2 working Monday through Thursday. Next, they’d alternate again, so on and so forth for the three months.
This would basically give the employee a four day weekend followed by a two day weekend, alternating throughout the summer. Can you say awesome? We only get cumulatively about three or four good months of summer weather up here anyway so we all like to make the most of it. 😊
Now let’s address the more tricky parts: the call schedule being the most difficult. Basically, if you were on call for a weekend during the summer, that would be your week to work Tuesday through Friday for obvious reasons. Working backwards with this information helped us group people into the appropriate group of 1 or 2 as well. We also had to take into account the one day of overnight call every other week, but most of the time you could slot people into their weekend on call and correlate the every other week day to fall on the same week or right after. Most people were also more than happy to switch a day or two of call or even a weekend to make it work.
Holidays: we would purposely schedule the summer months to be from the week or so after Memorial Day to the week before Labor day so the only holiday we had to worry about was the 4th of July. This year’s schedule would have gone from June 4 to August 31st. Apply the above on call parameters and it wasn’t too hard to cover the holiday.
Vacations: for those who weren’t participating, they could pretty much take off when needed. We did have to watch Fridays and Mondays however since those were low personnel days. Those who DID participate however were pretty restricted as it was understood that the schedule was a challenge to make work and if you are getting basically 6 four-day weekends throughout the summer without having to use vacation time, you pretty much suck it up and didn’t take any more time off. Not that it couldn’t be done, but it’s got to be fair for both employer as well as the other employees whether they were participating or not. I think being up front with people from the get go would help this as we didn’t have too many issues or complaints. People get sick, but everyone seemed to understand the team effort approach to make the schedule work.
Now I will offer my views as an employee as I was able to participate.
PROS: My PTO balance went from about 50 hours to almost 100 over those three months (that may not be completely accurate, just ball park… it’s been a few years lol). My family and I did some regional trips over those 4 day weekends and it was really nice to not use PTO for it. My wife wound up not liking it as much since I used a lot more PTO for hunting in the fall but Squatch ya gonna do? 😉
I was also more productive because I had to be! Only being at work for four days a week given what we do as practitioners gives you a different perspective. I found I had to stay on top of things that I may have set aside during office hours etc at a later time/day given that I really didn’t have the time/days to procrastinate! This was for both cast modifications as well as orders and dictations. We always got more busy in the summer months when everyone comes out of hibernation so it was imperative to stay on top of things. I would say revenue was better overall as things were getting done slightly faster than they were previous, but it all depends on how you look at it. I don’t have any numbers to back it up.
CONS: By the time you hit the Thursday before your four day weekend, you were ready as hell to be off for those days lol. The days are long and sometimes frantic, just given the amount of work you have to do in a condensed amount of days. By the end of the summer, I was ready for the schedule to be over. It may be more attractive to a younger prac or those without kiddos but as a guy in his late 30’s with two kids with their summer activities it got pretty stressful by the end. I think the pace was just more than I anticipated. Maybe just doing flat three day weekends without alternating the two groups would have been better… might not have worked though with the call schedules. Hard to say. However, by the time the next year rolled around I was ready to do it again! If given the choice, I probably would not choose a schedule like this for myself for more than the summer.
The only other con I can think of right now is if someone were to call in sick and you had a tight clinic schedule, etc. Other than that and if you did get a day off approved, you had to use 10 hours of PTO! That’s a pretty big chunk all at once, even if it is only two more hours than normal. I hope the above is helpful to you, and please feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
PS- I applaud your thought process in even thinking about allowing employees to have a schedule like this. I always think it can go a long way to good relationships with those you work with/for when new ideas are sought out and attempted. It doesn’t always have to be about the money to make a work place attractive to current and even prospective employees. Best of luck!
Derrick R. Kleiner, CPO
American Board Certified Prosthetist Orthotist
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300 Union Avenue |Suite C | Grants Pass OR 97527
Telephone. 541.955.9678
Fax. 541.471.4909
Email. [email protected]
www.SpectrumOandP.com
