Back when I was first building my scheduling algorithm for my clients, it took me months of trial and error to discover what makes a roster workable.
I eventually nailed down to 2 critical metrics.
Optimizing these 2 metrics allowed me to ensure a nice team morale and a well-rested team for my client’s ward.
And it certainly helped them improve patient care and reduce medical errors.
To save you time from making the same mistake as I did, I’m going to share the 2 metrics today.
Shift Imbalance
This is quite self-explanatory.
In general, you should either assign a certain number of shifts to your team,
or you should try to make sure everyone gets a similar number of shifts every month.
This way, your team members would feel that their workloads are even and fair.
This metric is intuitive, so I won’t spend too much words on this.
Shift dispersion
This metric asks: is everyone’s shift evenly distributed across the month?
If there are 30 shifts to take and 5 staff in total, it is best that each staff works in the spacing of 6 days.
This allows them to have maximal rest and recovery between exhaustive shifts.
That’s why it also allows them to have better physical and mental health.
And this can also reduce the number of medical errors due to staff fatigue.
This is sometimes pretty hard to achieve. For manual scheduling, you can often only trial and error until you’ve found a reasonably good dispersion that is fair for everyone.
Sometimes this will take hours.
But as you know, it is these details that decide whether a roster is workable for your team.
Alternatively, you could use a rostering algorithm to disperse shifts, which requires you to know a bit about programming. If you want to learn about the basics, you can download my free e-book at https://8-hours.com.hk/e-book
Conclusion
Here’s a quick summary:
- Shift imbalance: Distribute shifts equally across staff.
- Shift dispersion: try to space your shifts evenly across the month.
It is challenging to achieve perfect balance between these metrics.
Especially when you have to juggle with additional constraints, rules and regulations.
But the result is worth it.
When you’re the one in charge of the roster, you determine the work-life balance of your colleagues.
And I hope that by sharing these 2 metrics with you, you can now create a better roster for your team 😉
All the best!