Ditch Templates. Automate 4-on-4-off Schedule-Making.
The 4-on-4-off schedule is a continuous shift pattern for ensuring 24-hour coverage. It's one of the fundamental work schedules for the healthcare, logistics, security and hospitality sectors. 4-on-4-off shift schedules can be beneficial for both employers and employees but may also present challenges in schedule creation, shift allocation and complying with labour laws and regulations.
While scheduling automation software is becoming increasingly popular, it's vital to understand what features your organisation really needs to ensure that scheduling will become more efficient.
What Industries Use 4-on-4-off Shift Patterns?
First, we should take a look at who actually needs or benefits from a 4-on-4-off schedule. While 4-on-4-off schedule may seem like a speciality option, it is actually widely used for shift work to ensure the operations of many vital services that must ensure 24-hour coverage:
Manufacturing and production need to maintain continuous production and ensure uninterrupted operations.
Healthcare and nursing must ensure 24/7 patient care and adequate staffing coverage.
Emergency services, such as police, fire departments, and emergency medical services (EMS), need to maintain around-the-clock emergency response capabilities.
Utilities and energy, for example, power plants, water treatment facilities, and other utilities, must ensure continuous operation and maintenance of critical infrastructure.
Transportation and logistics, such as aviation, railways, shipping, and trucking, often utilise the 4-on-4-off shift pattern for roles like pilots, air traffic controllers, train operators, and long-haul truck drivers.
Hospitality and tourism establishments may use the 4-on-4-off schedule for roles like front desk staff, security personnel, and maintenance teams to provide seamless customer service.
Oil and gas industries, like offshore drilling rigs and oil refineries, require continuous extraction, production and maintenance operations.
Call centres and customer support may need to provide 24/7 availability for handling customer inquiries and support requests.
Security services and surveillance personnel often must maintain around-the-clock security coverage.
How Day and Night Shifts Ensure 24-hour Coverage
4-on-4-off work schedule is a shift pattern often used with four teams working 12-hour shifts. Each team works for four consecutive day shifts, has four days off, and works for four consecutive night shifts, followed by four days off. The four teams alternate their 12-hour shifts, ensuring around-the-clock coverage and a fair share of day and night shifts for each employee.
This creates a four-week cycle that repeats itself with inversed on and off for an overall cycle of eight weeks. The eight-week cycle repeats itself with an identical ON/OFF pattern but with inversed day and night shifts, and employees will have three consecutive weekends off during every eight-week cycle.
How to Automate 4-on-4-off Shift Patterns?
4-on-4-off shift schedule has pros and cons for both management's scheduling efficiency and employees' work and well-being. PARiM Staff Management Software has been tailored to solve Complex Shift Patterns.
Forget Templates. Use Smart Software.
Organisations need to design schedules that align with specific operational requirements, which is why manual 4-on-4 off scheduling is still so prevalent. But the right software solution can provide customisation options to guarantee that every organisational need is met while providing efficiency and automation.
PARiM Shift Patterns feature allows schedulers to create an endless array of ON/OFF shift schedules, such as a 4 on 4 off shift schedule consisting of 12-hour shifts, a continental shift pattern which may consist of eight-hour shifts or patterns that give employees every other weekend off or a 2-2-3 that switches the four consecutive days with three-day and three-night shifts. For more extensive healthcare staffing operations, this automation can provide a 50% increase in scheduling efficiency.
Manage Employee Availability
Ensuring adequate shift coverage and managing employee availability can be a massive challenge for schedulers. They need to coordinate the schedules of multiple employees, taking into account their availability and any time-off requests while ensuring that all shifts are adequately staffed.
With PARiM Staff Management Software, employees can set their availability for schedulers to quickly overview. This ensures that there will be no conflicts in shift allocation and no additional work needed to manage absences, as PARiM provides the solution to do it on one platform.
Ensure Employee Satisfaction and Well-being
Balancing employee preferences with operational requirements can cause headaches for schedulers who must consider and accommodate employee preferences as much as possible. At the same time, they must ensure that the schedule meets the organisation's needs.
PARiM enables employees to set their preferred locations for schedulers to easily match this. For some areas, such as the healthcare industry, this can be a crucial feature as situations can arise where some patients are unsuitable for specific nurses or vice versa.
Find Replacements Quickly
In circumstances where an employee calls in sick, a 12-hour shift can be challenging to fill. In this situation, PARiM Staff App provides the option to send out open shift notifications to all qualified staff members that can be potential replacements. Schedulers can then have replacements based on a first-come-first-serve basis to ensure an efficient flow of operations.
Ensure Compliance with Labour Laws
Schedulers must ensure that the shift schedule complies with labour laws and regulations regarding working hours, rest periods, and overtime. This includes monitoring and managing shift durations and break times and ensuring that employees receive appropriate rest between shifts.
PARiM provides schedulers with customisable tools to ensure that Working Time Regulations are met. This includes features to efficiently ensure that no employees work more than the set amount of hours within a specific time period. GPS Time Clock gives employees a convenient way to clock in their breaks without schedulers worrying if this is done at the correct location.
Overhaul Your Staff Management with PARiM
While 4 on 4 off schedule automation can provide immense benefits in itself, PARiM Staff Management Software has a multitude of benefits that can make it an ideal solution for larger staffing operations.
Features to Suit Medium and Large Staffing Operations
PARiM Staff Management features are tailored for both temporary and permanent workforce scheduling:
Scheduling automation: Allocate thousands of employees to their schedules automatically or create open shifts for first-come-first-serve scheduling.
GPS Time Clock: Track working hours by the minute on the job site.
Absence management and holiday pay automation:
A vast staff database: An unlimited staff database with detailed information and documents for each employee.
Modularity: Additions for NFC/iBeacon checkpoint routes, automatic check calls for lone worker safety and an event calendar.
Ease of Use
A user-friendly interface and intuitive navigation contribute to smooth adoption and efficient scheduling processes. Request a demo or free trial to have a firsthand experience with the software and help assess its usability and experience the instant loading times of the PARiM Staff Database and Staff App.
Scalability for Growing Your Business
Most workforce management software providers charge their clients per user. This creates huge risks for large operations managing temporary workforce while medium-sized organisations will have their growth hampered.
PARiM offers a unique no-per-user-based pricing model to provide a risk-free way to build your staff database and pay for actual scheduled hours that will guarantee you revenue streams. This is an ideal solution for a temporary workforce or businesses operating with seasonal risks as well as for medium-sized organisations looking to scale up.
Payroll Tracking and Automated Invoices
You can set up customisable Pay & Charge Rates, including holiday bonuses, to ensure compliance with labour laws while managing healthy revenue without manual calculations. When your employees clock in with PARiM, the software platform automatically creates timesheets with using the pay rates set up for their jobs and locations. At the same time, the charge rate will create invoices without having to worry about profit margins.
Integrations for Further Automation
PARiM Integrations Marketplace is an ever-increasing hub of industry-leading software solutions that can be used seamlessly with your PARiM environment. Wagestream will provide further payroll automation while BambooHR, Zapier and Data Extraction help organise your staff information.
Customer Support and Training
If you want personal guidance added to your free trial, request a free demo to have our experts guide you through the features. All PARiM customers will receive onboarding for training management, schedulers and employees. PARiM customer support team is continually expanding the support article base and will help out with specific questions via email or phone.
