Working out a rota for a new staff member

Speaker 1: Leanne, can you do me a favour?

We've got a new staff member, Yomi starting soon.

He needs to work a minimum of 135 hours over a 4-week period.

He might be open to doing some extra, you know how super-keen they are at the start.

Can you work out how many shifts that is and how best to arrange his rota?

Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, cool.

Speaker 1: Great, thanks Leanne.

Speaker 2: (TO AUDIENCE) OK. So our shifts are 7 and a half hours long.

I need to work out how many to give him across 4 weeks, so he gets the minimum of 135 contracted hours and they need to be arranged so they're properly balanced across the 4 weeks.

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!

Speaker 1: Hi Loz, I've had a look at the rota.

I've got a couple of options if you could check them.

Speaker 2: Great, what did you find?

Speaker 1: First I calculated we need to give him 18 shifts every 4 weeks.

Speaker 2: Right, OK.

Speaker 1: And that would give him his exact minimum of 135 hours.

But it didn't divide very well into shifts per week, it came to 4.5.

I know we don't do half shifts, so if he wants extra hours, we could give him 5 shifts per week.

If he doesn't, then I figured out that we could alternate his shifts, so it's 5 one week, 4 the next.

Speaker 2: OK, brilliant. I can see exactly what you've done and you sketched it in here.

It's great to have options. Let's see what he fancies.