Working out a rota for a new staff member

Speaker: I’m working out how many shifts to give our new staff member, Yomi.

We need to give him at least 135 hours every 4 weeks and each shift we give him has to be 7 and a half hours.

So, I need to see how many 7 and a half hour shifts would fit in 135 hours.

That’s 135 divided by 7.5 which is 18. That’s great, it divides well.

So, we need to give him at least 18 shifts every 4 weeks.

Now, I need to see how best to arrange these.

So how many shifts would this be per week?

18 shifts, divided by 4. That’s 4.5.

Mmmm, OK, that doesn’t work out so neatly.

It’s not practical to have half shifts.

I’ll just see what happens if I round it up to 5 full shifts, 5 times 4, so that would end up at 20 shifts every 4-week period.

So if I did it this way, that’s 2 extra than his minimum of 18.

But I’d better see if I can work out something between 4 and 5 shifts a week, to make it fit perfectly with his contracted hours.

If he did 5 shifts in 2 of the weeks and 4 shifts in the other 2 weeks, that might work. 18.

So, alternate weeks of 5 and 4 shifts. Great!