Schedules
Good Luck! I have been working in this business for nearly 35 years and I have seen everything tried at least once and many things revived again and again. Your biggest problems is always going to be from the management side; How much is it going to cost. I am traveling at the moment and recently worked in an ER that worked better than most. They had "full-time" (3 - 12 hour weekend staffing) which were paid an additional $5.00 per our to work stictly weekends. These were benefited positions that accrued sick leave and vacation time so you had to have enough staff to cover when they were absent. The regular staff worked 3-12's Monday through Thursday with per deim staffing to fill in the gaps.

But to bastardize a quote from President Lincoln: You can please all of the people some of the time, and you can please some of the people all of the time but you can't please all of the people all of the time!.

Let me know what type of unit, staffing, shift length and I will be happy to post some examples of rotational schedule if you want.

I work on a medsurg floor our focus is solid organ transplant. However we are mostly surgical. We do all shifts up to 12 hours. Anyways like I said we are just trying to get ideas and throw things around. My boss is all for new ideas as long as the floor is staffed. I am just trying to see if anyone out there has seen any different things being done that people really liked and might work on our floor.

At my medpass job, there are 4 nurses. We give our boss an availability list and she does the schedule from that, by seniority.

At my other job, we work 3 12's. If they need schedules covered, you can work a 4, 6, or 8 hours of it, and they will try to get someone to cover the rest. It works out nice, b/c if you want extra hours, but not a whole 12 hour shift, you can share shifts.

Nurse scheduling
I too have been creating, experimenting, revising, etc. nursing schedules for many years. If I had one schedule to pick from that was the least complicated for me and most pleasing to the staff I would have to pick "Self-Scheduling". I allow the staff to develop their own schedules onto a four week schedule. There are guidelines such as: only one of the four Fridays off, work equivalent of everyother weekend, or work four of the eight weekend shifts, etc. I warn staff how many nurses I expect to see scheduled each day. They are given a couple of weeks to complete their schedule. Once the time is up I collect the schedule, count numbers of staff each day and make adjustments as needed. Staff are warned that if the numbers aren't right - I'll be the one making the adjustments. When I do need to make adjustments before finalizing the schedule I make note of the staff I made changes to so that the next schedule I won't pick on their schedule again but somone else's schedule.
To me this is the best way to involve staff, get them to understand how a schedule is developed and to allow them input into their own days off. I like self-scheduling, used it for many years in different scenarios and have found it to be the best all around.
Good luck to you!

I found that if you can post a schedule out more than 2 weeks that the staff are much happier. I am able to post a 3 month schedule with the current schedule for 4 weeks, the next 4 week schedule next to it and the next 4 weeks after that is up for the staff to put down their requests. When the current schedule comes down, the staff request schedule is posted and the next month request schedule goes up.

Staff are MOST appreciative if they have input into their schedule and also if they can see in advance. The practice of not posting the next schedule until the last possible minute is POOR at best. People deserve to be able to plan their lives and nursing has done an extremely bad job at keeping their staff in the know.

If people are given the opportunity to self schedule and if there is a problem then let them work it out among themselves. I have not had any problems with this system and I have sufficient staff. If the staff can plan out vacations and see into the future they are happier and will be willing to accept the pitfalls that come along if they are few and far between.

The biggest thing is to let them see a schedule for more than 2 weeks at a time and to plan it out far enough into the future that they can actually plan vacations.

Schedules are very easy and all too many times managers make them a difficult task and create their own problems. Keep your staff posted and up to date

nursing Schedules
I enjoyed reading all the suggestions. As a staff nurse in the OR for many years, I always appreciated self scheduling the most, and we self scheduled for call. They never promised but always tried to honor request days off, and our schedule was also posted out 8 weeks in advance. We could negotiate any swap we wanted as long as the shift was covered and we did the paperwork to the manager to document it.
Now, I am entering into a clinic manager position, and I appreciate the suggestions and feedback from you all.

creative schedules
I'm currently working in the recovery room in Kingston. I'm trying to come up with a schedule with a mix of 12hrs and 8hrs. Has anyone worked a schedule like this. Does anyone have any ideas?

we work 2 7a's and 2 7-3 or 2 7p's and 11-7's or some of our nurses work 3-3p/3-3a but we have to have partners..........to do that shift so that the floor remains covered at all times