Building a Fatigue-Safe Fortnightly Roster: A Worked Example

A fatigue roster example is the fastest way to see where breaches hide. Build the fortnight in layers, check daily hours, weekly hours and rest gaps after every change, and pay special attention to the swing between day and night work. In the worked example below, a draft that looked fine on the board fails three checks, and each fix is shown.

The numbers used here are example settings that many companies start from, not legal limits. Every company should set its own limits from a fatigue risk assessment. For the background, see our guide to fatigue management for traffic controllers. This article is the hands-on version.

The example limits and the work to cover

Example scenario: a traffic control company has a regular crew of six traffic controllers (TC 1 to TC 6), two of whom also hold team leader tickets (TC 1 and TC 2). They are building the roster for a fortnight.

Example fatigue settings (from the company's risk assessment):

Work to cover:

• Weekdays, both weeks: two day crews of three (team leader plus two TCs) on a long-running utility project, 6:00 am to 2:30 pm. While the night works run in week 2 (Wednesday to Friday), the client drops to one day crew.
• Saturdays: one day crew of three for builders, 7:00 am to 1:00 pm.
• Week 2, Wednesday to Friday nights: one night crew of three for resurfacing, 8:00 pm to 5:00 am.

That means six people every weekday, three on Saturdays, and in week 2 three on days and three on nights from Wednesday to Friday. With six controllers, the night crew must come out of the same pool as the day crews, which is exactly where breaches happen. A casual covers the two days lost to leave and training.

Step 1: Place the fixed commitments first

Start with anything that cannot move: approved leave, training days, known personal commitments and site inductions. In this example, TC 6 has a training day on Monday of week 2, and TC 4 has approved leave on Friday of week 1.

Placing these first stops the common mistake of building a perfect roster and then discovering half the crew is unavailable.

Step 2: Place the night block and protect both sides of it

Night work is the hardest to recover from, so place it before the day work. The allocator picks TC 2 (team leader), TC 3 and TC 5 for the week 2 nights, Wednesday to Friday.

Now protect both sides of the block:

• Before: no day shift on the Wednesday. The last day shift is Tuesday.
• After: the last night finishes 5:00 am Saturday. No Saturday day shift, and Sunday off. Day work resumes Monday at the earliest.

Step 3: Fill day work and check each person

Now fill the weekday and Saturday day crews from the remaining availability. Here is the first draft for TC 3, the person whose roster causes the most trouble.

Draft roster for TC 3:

The board looked fine because every individual shift is a normal length. The checks tell a different story.

Step 4: Run the three checks and fix each breach

Here is the example calculation for TC 3.

Check 1: hours in a 24-hour period. On Wednesday of week 2, the 6:00 am to 2:30 pm day shift plus the 8:00 pm night shift puts 17.5 hours of work inside the 24 hours from 6:00 am Wednesday. Limit 12. Fails.

Check 2: rest between shifts. Wednesday 2:30 pm to 8:00 pm is 5.5 hours' rest. Limit 10. Fails. Separately, the Friday night shift finishes at 5:00 am Saturday and the Saturday day shift starts at 7:00 am: 2 hours' rest. Fails.

Check 3: weekly hours. Week 1 is 48.5 hours. That passes, but leaves only 1.5 hours of headroom: one overrun on any day and the week fails. Week 2 is 58.5 hours. Limit 50. Fails.

The fixes:

1. Remove the Wednesday day shift in week 2. TC 3 finishes Tuesday at 2:30 pm, has Wednesday to adjust, and starts nights at 8:00 pm. Rest gap: 29.5 hours.
2. Remove Saturday of week 2. TC 3 finishes nights at 5:00 am Saturday, then has Saturday and Sunday off.
3. Move the week 1 Saturday to TC 4, who has the most headroom because of their leave day, so TC 3's week 1 has room for an overrun.

Fixed roster for TC 3:

Both weeks now pass with headroom. The Wednesday-to-Thursday and Thursday-to-Friday night gaps are 15 hours each (5:00 am to 8:00 pm), which passes the rest check.

Step 5: Check the whole crew, not just one person

Fixing TC 3 moved work to other people, so run the same checks across everyone. A one-page summary makes problems obvious:

All figures are part of this example calculation. TC 6's week 2 includes the 8-hour training day, because training is work time too. The "low headroom" weeks are the ones to watch. If an overrun is likely on the project, move a Saturday or one weekday to someone with more room, or bring in a casual for that day.

Beyond the numbers: what the hours do not show

A roster can pass every numeric check and still be risky. Before publishing it, ask:

• Heat and conditions. An 8.5-hour shift on a stop/slow position in summer heat is more tiring than the same hours on a quiet closure. See our guide to heat stress and traffic controllers.
• Driving home after nights. The drive after a 5:00 am finish is often the riskiest part of the shift. Our article on driving home after night shift covers practical controls.
• Travel. If the night crew lives an hour from site, add it to the day under your travel rule.
• Second jobs and personal circumstances. Ask people to tell you about other work. A controller with a second job may already be tired when they arrive.
• Breaks. Make sure the roster allows the breaks the award and your policy require, and that the plan allows controllers to be relieved.

Keeping the roster safe after it is published

The roster is a plan. Fatigue happens in the actual hours.

• Update the roster from actual finish times every day, not booked ones.
• Re-run the checks whenever a shift is added, swapped or extended.
• Give team leaders the authority to stop a controller who is clearly too tired, and back them when they do.
• Record any exception, who approved it and why, and review exceptions monthly.
• Remember that penalty rates and overtime under the applicable award may apply to nights, weekends and long days. Check current rates with the Fair Work Ombudsman, and see our guide to rostering traffic controllers for the wider process.

Next steps

Take your next fortnight, build it in the order shown here and run the three checks on every person before you publish it. If you would rather the checks run automatically as you assign shifts, TrafWise has rostering with configurable fatigue limits and clash checks on the allocation board, so breaches are flagged before the offer goes out.