It’s safe to say that working long hours (>8, but especially >12) is unhealthy and detrimental to the workers’ efficiency. Why do many employers still make their employees work in such long shifts? Medical Doctors and security guards come to my mind straight away. Why not just rotate 3 people within the day to cover it with 8 hour shifts, so that you have rested employees who perform better and make fewer mistakes? Especially since employers usually pay extra for the long shifts and can’t have that employee come in again for 24 or even 48 hours. Someone please shed some light on this…
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In many cases it’s a question of problems associated with handover between shifts vs problems associated with longer shifts. Even with good note taking, handover attempts pretty much always miss something. In IT environments that I’m more familiar with, this means repetition of troubleshooting steps and general extension of outages.In medical fields, it can lead to further medical complications or death. So it becomes a matter of finding out where the dangers of handover failures get outweighed by the dangers of fatigue.
For other professions, it can sometimes be a matter of trying to min/max shift hours. If you want two people on shift at all times, but not more if you can help it, and you need coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and want to give everyone 40 hours but not more, what kinds of funky shifts do you start needing?
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