Suggestion; once on the 'night shift' stay put for at least three months... Sleep patterns take time to adjust. Jumping between day and night shifts will burn out even the most motivated employee.
Mark Green
+1. I'd go to six months, having been the night shift bitch. Flipping
shifts around damn near killed me.
Amen. There is evidence that, other things being relatively equal, people
working rotating shifts have shorter life expectancies and that the faster
the rotation, the shorter the expectancy gets. There also is some evidence
that people working rotating shifts are more likely to get cancer.
My experience:
6 on, 2 off, 8 hours, rotating to the next later shift: I never, ever got
enough sleep -- for 2 years.
6 on, 2 off, 12 hours, straight mids, no rotation: much less bad.
5 on, 2 off, 8 hours, straight mids: quite tolerable.
5 on, 2 off, 8 hours, straight swings (1600-0000): out of phase with the
world.
YMMV; I expect it to.
In a past work life, there was a short experimental run where it was believed that the company I worked for could achieve 24/7 coverage through individuals being on-call throughout the entire weekend AND doing overnight maintenance during the week in 12 hour daily shifts from 8PM to 8AM. Needless to say, coming from a daytime schedule one week, covering all pages on a weekend which prevented you from getting much sleep, working 5 12 hour shifts in the following week on shortened sleep cycles (over 100 hours in total with the on-call and 12 hour shifts), then switching back to daytime hours the next week took a toll on me rather quickly. I think we got an extra week day off in there somewhere to recover the following week, but it was basically like running a person into the ground until they were almost dead, then letting them recover while the same thing was done to the next person. There were only 4 people to abuse like this at the time so it happened once a month. Luckily everyone came to their senses and realized this wasn't sustainable and it didn't last for more than a few months total.
Moral of the story, don't do this to people unless you're into torture. 
-Vinny
Suggestion; once on the 'night shift' stay put for at least three months... Sleep patterns take time to adjust. Jumping between day and night shifts will burn out even the most motivated employee.
What we found was that we would find people who wanted to be on the night shift, and would NOT like to be changed, at all. Some people like night
work, or have family situations where it is ideal for them.
Regards
Marshall
Yah. Read the current news coverage about sleeping U.S. air traffic controllers, especially the articles about how hard it is to switch shifts, and very especially if you do it often.
--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
>
What we found was that we would find people who wanted to be on the
night shift, and would NOT like to be changed, at all. Some people
like
night
work, or have family situations where it is ideal for them.Regards
Marshall
+1
I would start by first taking an audit of skills. Some people are just
really good troubleshooters above and beyond average in that respect.
You want at least one of those on each shift. Some other people are
really great at attention to every little detail in documentation. You
want at least one of those, too, on each shift. Sometimes those skills
overlap but my experience is that they are rooted in different
personality traits and the two complement each other and are only rarely
found in the same person. Everyone else will be pretty much average in
both respects.
Then look at family situations. Married with children will probably not
much care for swing shift if their kids are school age as they will
never see them except on their days off. Mids are difficult for people
with a toddler at home (ever try to sleep with a toddler in the house?)
but work well with school-aged kids (parent can sleep while child is at
school). Single parents are going to hate mids and swings.
Look at individual preferences. Some people are natural night owls,
some are natural morning people. Don't try to work against that if you
can avoid it. So you might have a swing shift loaded up with single
people, mids with people who like working those hours and maybe married
with school-aged children. Day shift with single parents and higher
level supervisory rolls.
But the extent to which you take into account people's natural
preferences, natural strengths and weaknesses, and their situation at
home can make a huge difference in a harmonious situation on the job.
I've done all of the above but the 12 hour shift and can add 5 on, 2 off, 8 hours, rotating between swings and mids. They sucked. I'm in general agreement with Mike's judgments as well.
If you want to be fair to your people and help keep their morale up, straight shifts is the way to go - or at least fix the mids shift and make the swing/mids switch at 2200 (10pm). Changing sleep times is the quickest way to get zombies for employees.
If you try to do a 6 and 2 style rotation, eventually some smart person is going to figure out that they're getting screwed out of a lot of weekend and holiday time as opposed to the "daybeggers."
My recommendation, based on 10 years of this nonsense in the Army, is minimum 2 people per shift, 5 on, 2 off, stagger the weekends so that someone gets Fri-Sat, the other Sun-Mon. If they can decide which wants which weekend between themselves, so much the better.
As the FAA has lately demonstrated, single person night shifts is generally a bad thing if you actually want them to stay awake.
As the FAA has lately demonstrated, single person night shifts is
generally a bad thing if you actually want them to stay awake.--
Jeff Shultz
Jeff, there are other reasons for not having a single individual on an
overnight shift. A person can have an unexpected medical emergency at
any time or experience an accident. Getting help to them quickly can
make a difference between life and death. Even choking on a meal can
have a completely different outcome if there is another person
available. Having only one person in a facility overnight by themselves
just isn't a good idea, in my opinion.
Local emergency services[1] operate '2 days, 2 nights, 4 off'.
Dayshifts are 10 hour 8am-6pm. Nightshift is 6pm until 8am. This creates a 4-watch rotation.
The day shifts are relatively normal working hours, and the 4 consecutive days off are handy, and as it's an 8 day cycle it slowly rotates so that you can wind up with weekends or weekdays off over time (which in itself can be handy). The guys employed this way are often given a little handbook with their year printed on it so they can plan their lives.
Mark.
[1] Fire and Ambulance services operate this way to my knowledge, Police is different depending on the part of the country you're in...
I dunno from Ambulance -- they're load driven... by my understanding is that around here, the fire people are 3 days on, and 4 days off, or something
similar to that. Since they sleep in, they're effectively on-call at
all times, and they've got enough people on a shift that they can do
internal rotations as to who goes, unless it's a big enough call that they
all need to roll, which is a small enough percentage of calls to make
it work.
Cheers,
- jra