Shift Bidding

What shift bidding is

Shift bidding is a way of filling open shifts in which each shift is offered to the employees qualified for it, each of them states which shifts they want, and the shifts are then allocated by a published rule that decides between competing requests, instead of being handed out at a supervisor’s discretion.

The method concerns the allocation of shifts, not their design. How many shifts there are, when they fall and how many people each one needs are all decided before any bidding starts. Shift bidding deals with one question only: who takes which shift.

What shift bidding addresses

A schedule that a supervisor draws up by hand carries a complaint the supervisor has no way to answer: that the desirable shifts go to the people closest to the supervisor, and that the undesirable ones keep falling to the same people. Denial does not settle a complaint of this kind, because there is no record showing how the shifts were allocated.

Shift bidding moves the decision from an unwritten judgement to a written rule that can be checked after the event. If the supervisor is asked “Why did this colleague get the Thursday shift?”, the answer is a line in the rule, not an opinion about people. That on its own is the first gain of shift bidding, ahead of any effect on satisfaction or on absence.

What shift bidding cannot work without

• A qualified pool. Each shift is offered to those suited to it by qualification, licence and experience, not to everyone. Getting this wrong produces a complete schedule filled with names that do not fit their positions.
• A published priority rule. The rule decides between employees when more than one of them wants the same shift.
• A fixed closing time for requests. Without a set deadline the round stays open, and no schedule can be built on it.

A round can also run without a published priority rule. Requests are opened, the supervisor then settles each clash by judgement, and the method is back where it started, now under a new name.

Everything in shift bidding turns on the priority rule

Three priority rules are in use, and each has a different effect:

• Seniority. The request of the employee with the longest service wins. Of the three rules it is the plainest and the least open to argument, and it shuts out new joiners more than either of the others.
• Order of request. Whoever registers a request first wins. The rule measures speed of response and nothing else, and it favours whoever happens to check their phone at the right moment.
• Credit balance. Each employee earns points for the undesirable shifts they have worked, and when requests clash the higher balance wins. Over time this rule is the fairest of the three, and the heaviest to administer.

The effect of choosing between them shows up in the arithmetic. Take a team of 4 employees with 12 desirable shifts a quarter, which makes 48 a year:

• Under seniority alone, the longest serving employee takes every shift they want, so their share could reach 48 and the newest employee’s share zero, as long as all four want the same shifts.
• Under the credit balance, each share settles at around 12 a year, because whoever takes a shift sees their balance fall, and someone else moves ahead of them the next time.

The difference between the two rules is one of outcome, not of procedure. Seniority produces a fixed allocation that changes only when the people change; the credit balance produces rotation. An organisation that chooses seniority and is then surprised when new joiners complain has chosen an outcome and then disowned it.

The figures in this example and in the examples that follow are assumed. They are there to show how the calculation works; they are not a benchmark, and they are not quoted from any source. The effect of each priority rule is set out above, and the choice between them is a policy decision for the organisation.

The real test of shift bidding is the rule for leftover shifts

Shift bidding settles the question of desirable shifts and leaves the harder one open: who takes the shifts nobody asked for. Suppose there are 30 open shifts in a week, and employees request 22 of them. That leaves 8 shifts that no one wants.

Those eight shifts decide whether the method is fair. If they go to the people who did not take part in the round, taking part becomes a risk, and people learn to hold back. If they go by reverse credit, that is, to whoever has worked the fewest undesirable shifts so far, they extend the same rule and the method stays consistent.

An organisation that opens a round without a written rule for the leftover shifts finds itself, at the end of every week, allocating the eight by judgement, which is the position it set out to leave.

Coverage comes before preference in shift bidding, and may leave it no room

Bidding works only where there is spare capacity. Consider 30 shifts that each need 2 employees, making 60 positions in total. If the team has 20 employees and each of them works 3 shifts, what they can cover between them also comes to 60.

With these numbers there is no spare capacity at all. Every employee has to fill three particular shifts for the schedule to be complete, so granting any request leaves another position uncovered. Bidding here is form without substance, because the only workable allocation is fixed in advance.

If the team grew to 22 employees with the same capacity each, they could cover 66 positions against the 60 required, a surplus of 6 positions, or 10 percent of what is required. Requests have room to move within that surplus and nowhere else.

It follows that an organisation which complains about its schedule and responds with shift bidding while running with no spare capacity has not addressed the cause of the problem, which in that situation is a shortage of qualified people rather than the method of allocation.

The cost of shift bidding is recurring administrative time

A single round needs an announcement, a window for requests, a closing point, a decision on each clash, publication of the result, and then the handling of any withdrawals that come in afterwards. Together these make a full cycle, and the cycle repeats every week or twice a month, depending on the length of the schedule.

In the coverage example above, 60 positions shared among 20 employees gives an average of 3 per employee. A share of three is small, and it makes a dispute over any single shift sharper rather than milder. A schedule half as long needs twice as many rounds, and the whole cycle is repeated with each of them.

That is why the method suits settings where the number of shifts is large and the qualified pool is wide. A team of three covering shifts that are equally desirable gains nothing from shift bidding except a procedure.

What can and cannot be said about the effect of shift bidding

The case made for shift bidding is that an employee who chose a shift is less likely to miss it and less likely to ask to swap it. The argument is reasonable on its face, but we have no published measurement of it for the Saudi market, and we do not state here how large its effect is on the absence rate or on employee engagement.

What can be said without going further is that shift bidding gives the employee a degree of control over their own time, which puts it in the same family as job autonomy. An organisation that wants to check the effect can measure it in its own setting, on the same team, before and after introducing the method, rather than borrowing a figure from elsewhere.

In the sources we reviewed we found no published measurement of the effect of shift bidding on absence or on the retention rate, and the lack of a measurement does not show that there is no effect.

Shift bidding and the arrangements next to it

• Shift work is the arrangement itself: covering the work with successive shifts. Shift bidding is a way of allocating those shifts to people. Every organisation that runs shift bidding works in shifts, but not every organisation that works in shifts runs shift bidding.
• Shift swaps between two employees happen after the schedule is published, involve two named people and need the supervisor’s approval. Shift bidding happens before the schedule is published and involves the whole group. Relying on swaps alone leaves the original allocation as it was and deals only with its effects.
• Rules on working time sit outside shift bidding. Working hours and rest have their own sources, covered in our guides to working hours and the weekly rest and to compensatory rest, and night work has its own sources as well. The definition of shift bidding creates no rule on any of these, and we draw no ruling from what our sources leave unaddressed.

What undermines shift bidding

• An exception granted outside the rule. A single shift taken from the employee who won it, to please someone else, undoes everyone’s trust in the rounds that follow, because the value of a rule lies in its consistent application, not in its wording.
• An announcement that does not reach everyone at the same time. This defeats the order of request rule in particular, because the race becomes one to hear the news rather than one to make the request.
• A balance not shown to its holders. An employee who cannot see their balance cannot plan around it, and to them the priority decision becomes one more judgement dressed up as arithmetic.
• A rule changed partway through the period. An employee who planned requests around one rule and then saw it replaced has lost what they had built up, and a later announcement does not make up for that loss.
• A round opened after the schedule has been set. When shifts are offered once the schedule has been filled in advance except for a few, bidding gets only the scraps. Employees see the round for what it is the first time and stop taking part.
• A qualification condition left unchecked. A complete schedule with names that do not fit their positions is worse than an incomplete one, because the mismatch comes to light only during the shift itself.

Before the first shift bidding round opens

Five lines are written down and announced before the round, not after it: who belongs to the qualified pool for each type of shift, what the priority rule is when requests clash, when requests close, how the shifts nobody asked for are assigned, and what cancels a request that has been accepted.

After three rounds, one number is reviewed: each employee’s share of the undesirable shifts. If the shares are close, the rule is working. If they are concentrated on particular names, the rule exists on paper and is not working, and one possible cause is that the leftover shifts are being assigned outside the rule while the round alone is taken to be the whole method.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.

Related terms

• Formalization
• Organizational Politics
• Burnout
• Hawthorne Effect
• Retention Rate