Early bird or night owl? Help your staff to work shifts that fit their natural sleeping patterns

Are you the type of person who springs out of bed in the morning? Or are you someone who doesn’t really get going until the sun goes down?

We often make personal plans around the times of day that suit our energy levels. However, we’re expected to conform to the same schedule when it comes to work.

In shift-based businesses, knowing whether your staff are early birds or night owls could make a massive difference to your workload planning. As the closer you can align team rotas with people’s productivity ‘sweet spots’, the greater operational efficiency you can achieve…

People’s sleep patterns are scientifically wired

Describing yourself as a morning or evening person isn’t just a preference; a new study has shown that people are hard-wired to perform better at certain times of the day.

Researchers from McGill University tracked 74 police officers over a month of shift work. They found that participants had different chronotypes, which influenced their ability to sleep at particular times of day.

Each police officer’s chronotype affected how easily they could catch up on sleep at the end of a long shift. For example, early risers slept for an extra 1.1 hours after a morning shift, but night owls slept two hours longer once they’d completed a night shift.

Helping shift workers to recover quicker

Understanding that a preference for morning or evening shift work is biology-based can help businesses create staff schedules that align with people’s energy levels. If someone is a night owl, they’re not only going to perform better during an evening shift; they’ll sleep longer afterwards, which helps them to recover quicker. The same goes for early birds and morning shifts.

Supporting staff recovery from long shifts has real commercial benefits. It helps to reduce illness rates, tackle workplace anxiety and prevent shift workers from burning out, all of which cause employee absences.

Quicker recovery can also promote greater health and safety awareness and regulatory compliance, as people are more alert when they’re on shift. This is especially important for any employees that are operating heaving machinery, handling dangerous substances or carrying out high risk tasks.

However, many companies struggle to put effective, consistent shift plans together full stop, let alone get to the point where individual employee preferences for working hours can be factored in. And this is because they are using manual spreadsheets or basic software to plan the working rota.

Playing to staff strengths every single shift

The most straightforward way to optimise work shift plans is to use an online rostering tool to manage people’s time.

At a foundation level, online shift planning software allows your business to set your exact staffing needs for every shift. This can include details of certain skills or qualifications required, as well as how many senior personnel need to be on duty.

While it’s possible to create this information via a spreadsheet, digital scheduling software will highlight any staffing gaps, so you can make sure every shift is fully staffed ahead of time. And it will recommend people with the right certifications or seniority to fill any gaps, as well as highlight anyone who isn’t available to work – for example, if they’ve booked annual leave that week.

For more ambitious users, shift planning technology allows you to start factoring in the individual needs of each employee. This may be done on contractual terms; making sure that nobody is assigned more than their maximum hours. Or work around people’s childcare needs.

However, if you want to experiment with the early bird/night owl theory, you can use digital scheduling software to set parameters around when people are available to work based on their natural sleeping patterns. So you play to staff strengths every single shift.

Keep employees happy with good shift planning

Ultimately, online rostering software helps companies to optimise operations while managing staffing levels. It’s up to you how creatively you interpret the concept of optimisation – and whether you want to see the impact of putting your early birds on morning shifts and your night owls on late shifts.

However you design your shift plans, finding the ideal mix of people on schedule at any one time will maximise your productivity, at the same time as making employees feel supported and capable in their role. Giving them the opportunity to fit work around their built-in alertness levels will be the icing on the cake.

WhosOffice is an online staff scheduling system that empowers businesses to find the perfect mix of people for every shift. Start your free trial now to explore it.