Time · 2.6

Predictable scheduling, and why it matters more than hours

Predictable scheduling, and why it matters more than hours. What is actually the case, and how it compares with what is repeated.

For a practical software perspective on this topic, Monitask provides a concise companion guide.

For a large part of the workforce the difficulty is not how many hours but not knowing which ones. Predictability is measurable, it is unequally distributed, and it is almost absent from the public argument about working time.

What unpredictable scheduling looks like

A rota published two or three days ahead. Shifts cancelled on the morning. On-call shifts in retail, where a worker keeps the day free and is told at the last moment whether to come in. Back-to-back closing and opening shifts with a few hours between them. Hours that vary by a factor of two between weeks.

Each of these is a way of transferring the cost of uncertain demand from the employer to the worker, and each is made possible by scheduling software that forecasts demand in short intervals.

What it costs

Income volatility, which makes budgeting impossible and pushes people towards short-term credit. Childcare that must be arranged and paid for against hours that may not happen. A second job that cannot be held because the first will not commit. And sleep that follows the roster rather than a rhythm.

Large-scale survey work with hourly service workers finds these outcomes clustering together and associating with measures of household hardship, and finds the association independent of the number of hours worked.

The legislative response

Several American cities and one state have adopted fair or secure scheduling laws, beginning with San Francisco in 2014 and followed by Seattle, Oregon statewide, New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia among others.

They share a shape: advance notice of the schedule, typically ten to fourteen days; predictability pay when the employer changes it inside that window; a minimum rest period between closing and opening; and a requirement to offer additional hours to existing part-time staff before hiring.

Whether they work

Evaluations of the Seattle ordinance found improvements in the predictability workers reported and in several wellbeing measures, with the effects concentrated among the workers whose schedules had been worst before.

Compliance is the weak point, as it is with most workplace regulation that depends on individual complaint, and coverage thresholds mean many smaller employers fall outside.

The employer's problem, stated fairly

Demand in retail and hospitality genuinely varies, sometimes sharply and at short notice, and labour is the largest controllable cost. A manager held to a labour percentage will cut hours when custom is thin, because that is what the target rewards.

Which locates the problem accurately: it is not primarily software or malice but a target that measures one thing and a cost that falls on somebody who is not measured at all.

What changes it without legislation

Publishing schedules further ahead, which costs a forecasting error rather than money. Guaranteed minimum hours, which converts uncertainty into a fixed cost. Stable core shifts with a variable margin, rather than variability across the whole roster. And giving workers a mechanism to swap, which absorbs some variation at no cost to anybody.

Employers who have tried these report retention improvements, and retention is expensive enough in these sectors that the arithmetic frequently works.

Why hours dominate the conversation instead

Because hours are a single number and predictability is not, and because the people writing about work mostly have predictable schedules and therefore do not experience the variable as a variable.

That is the argument of this site in one more instance: the visible question is the one that affects the observer.

What to measure

Days of advance notice. Proportion of shifts changed after publication. Variation in weekly hours over a quarter. Frequency of turnarounds under eleven hours.

All four are cheap to compute from data every employer already holds, and an organisation that has never computed them is not managing the thing that most affects the people on its rota.

The clopening

Closing a site late and opening it early the following morning, with under eight hours between. It is common in food service and retail, it is prohibited or penalised by most of the scheduling ordinances, and it is the single scheduling practice with the clearest evidence of harm.

It persists where it is not prohibited because it is convenient for whoever writes the rota, and because the person doing it is frequently the most junior member of staff.

What a worker can ask for

The rota further ahead, a guaranteed minimum, and a stated rest period between shifts. All three are ordinary requests, all three cost the employer less than the turnover they prevent, and the argument for them is commercial rather than moral, which is generally the more persuasive form.

For broader context, consult Harvard Shift Project.