Probably wrong place to put this but....weekend rotas

[AnyFuckerForAMincePie]

Hi all. I have a question I hope you can help me with.

If you were to start providing a weekend (52 weekends, to include the bank holidays too) service instead of Mon-Fri, is there a way/formula to work out how many times you would be rota'ed to work taking into account..

1. no. of staff available
   
   
2. annual leave which would mean not working the weekend either end of a week/2 week period
   
   
3. sickness abscence
   
   
4. maternity leaves
   
   I understand (1) and (2) are the only factors that are fixed, so would be happy for anything around just those if anyone can help at all.

[OWe3WiseKneeHairsOfOrientAre]

I have worked in the NHS on a rota for years.
Basically if there are 4 of you, you do every fourth weekend.
Depending on whether the rota is done when annual leave is known or not, you then either swap a w/e if you are working when you want to take leave or the rota-maker-person does the swap beforehand. This is called a 1 in 4 with prospective cover and it means that you may do 2 out of 3 weekends at times, but overall you are doing a 1 in 4.
As for sickness leave, you hope someone isn't off sick for their w/e on call.
Materity leave, you either get a locum or end up doing a 1 in 3 (for example) for that period of time.

don't know if this is the kind of thing you wanted to know, but I have too long experience of these

[AnyFuckerForAMincePie]

thanks for your reply

I get what you are saying...everyone's annual leave cancels out each other's annual leave, so you are still doing "one in four"

over a year though, you would be doing more than one in four weekends, unless you count a 4 day weekend (Easter...a lot of the Xmas's) as a normal 2 day weekend (which it categorically is not)

and your holidays would shove your "weekends on" closer together, thus increasing the number of weekends you have to work outside of annual leave

am I making sense...having trouble articulating it

[TheFollyfootandtheivy]

I've used this way to work out rotas in the past, but no idea whether tis of any use for you?

Say there are 10 people on a rota. They each have say 6 weeks of annual leave to take a year so thats 60 weeks of leave or 1.15 'people' missing all the time (60/52). In other words you actually have 8.85 people to cover all the shifts, including all the weekends. Obviously you can change the amount of leave, include BHs etc. Feel free to ignore if its of bugger all use to you

[TwoHats]

I used to work a rotation which included weekends, every 12 weeks we had 2 full weekends and 2 weeks involving Saturday working.

We weren't allowed to take leave on weekend days, they had to be swapped. This sounds harsh but it meant that by swapping sensibly you could have quite a bit of time off whilst taking relatively little leave.

Do you need as many people at the weekend? Same on Sat and Sun or different?

In my experience if the weekend enhancement is good enough people will be falling over themselves to do the rotation or weekend overtime. If it's not then you'll always struggle to cover them.

[AnyFuckerForAMincePie]

The weekend enhancement will be zero

Folly, do you mind if I pm you

nothing secretive, just the details might out me

[Lonecatwithkitten]

I schedule weekend on call rotas. We work one in four. I schedule the weekends for the entire year then we swap to accommodate holidays etc. we treat bank holidays total separate and they have their own rota and we work 2 per year. I try run a bank holiday in an on call weekend. This does that you have crap periods were you work more than 1 in 4 and then you have great periods where you work less than 1 in 4.
After 14 years of this I know you have to look at the big picture over the entire year, if you look too closely at individual 4 or 8 week periods you will go bonkers.
So the long a short of it is I work 13 weekends and 2 bank holidays per year.

[AnyFuckerForAMincePie]

thanks, this is all helping

[TheFollyfootandtheivy]

Thats fine AF. I have had shedloads of wine tonight as DH going away for weekend but may be more sensible tomorrow (well, as sensible as I ever get)

Swoons at the mere thought of a PM from MNet royalty....

[AnyFuckerForAMincePie]

OK, I am going to pm you but I don't want any puking in my inbox

[Sabriel]

All I would say is that DH works most weekends and if he takes a week's leave he only gets the weekend that is part of that week, not the one at each end.

[Rockchick1984]

Was just going to say the same as Sabriel when I used to do rotas all annual leave had to be booked at the start of the year, and your holiday was Monday-Sunday so you had 7 days off rather than 9 in a row. This worked for us as long as management are flexible eg if someone wanted to swap a weekend it was fine but they had to arrange it with a colleague and just notify me once it was arranged. Likewise, although holidays were arranged at the start of the year, it was fine to change with a reasonable amount of notice as long as either no one else was off that week or someone was happy to swap.

[YouSeveredHead]

Ditto work it as a year, allows for much fairer and easier for you.

Clearly set out policy for swapping shifts so no accidents can happen where people don't turn up!