Eliminating unnecessary police overtime: an unrealistic dream?

With spending on police overtime in England and Wales having increased by 90% over the past decade, despite a record rise in the number of officers and high-level recommendations for change, the Police Service is preparing itself to feel the force of our new coalition government’s budget axe. This needn’t be at the expense of the quality of policing and officers’ work-life balance – quite the opposite argues Working Times Solutions’ MD, Kevin White

A widespread culture of overtime is prevalent in the UK, with nearly 1.4 million of us regularly working more than 60 hours a week, despite the well-documented relationship between long-hours working, stress, fatigue and accidents.

Such overtime dependencies in predominantly shift-working
environments are usually an indicator of a misalignment between the requirement for staff and the levels delivered by the shift patterns worked.

Additionally, the Police Service’s dependency on overtime,
in spite of a rise in the recruitment of both officers and civilian
staff, has the potential to result in a negative public perception
of the profession.

The BBC’s home affairs correspondent, Andy Tighe, for
example, unearthed a recent report that highlights officers
getting generous overtime allowances for merely answering the
phone on a day off – a damaging claim against the reputation
of a hard-working profession. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8678286.stm)

Former policing minister, David Hanson, has admitted that there was a police culture in which overtime was acceptable, rather than exceptional, but the Police Federation of England and Wales says its members work overtime out of a sense of public duty, not out of choice.

Younger officers, in particular, want a work-life balance, but
overtime payments persuade them to work unsociable hours.

The Police Service’s overtime bill was nearly £400 million last
year so, for cash-strapped young officers with families to support, the pull of overtime is certainly winning.

Nevertheless, improved planning on the basis of demand
and the robust management of working time could reduce the
calls on their sense of public duty, relieving the burden on the
public purse at a crucial time for our economy.

A Home Office report notes that in a service that spends
approximately 80 per cent of its resources on its people, a
significant number of whom work shifts, it is surprising that there is so little consensus as to what constitutes a successful
shift pattern. (Study of Police Resource Management and
Rostering Arrangements, 2004)

This, combined with staff sickness, holidays, court appearances, training and other absences, is likely to be a major contributing factor in the police force incurring increased labour costs.

Overtime costs the public sector much more than it realises,
however. Overtime-generated fatigue costs between £100 and
£200 million every year in work accidents alone, demonstrating
that while such costs may be an unwanted expense for the
emergency services in general, excessive overtime can also be
at the expense of the employee’s health, morale, productivity
and work-life balance.

In the private sector, the adverse effects of overwork are
well documented; continuously working excessive hours can
lead to low productivity and fatigue, poor self-esteem and
mistakes.

Many of the major industrial accidents over the last 25 years
have been directly related to the effects of long-hours working,
and over 35% of people have been proven to perform less efficiently because of tiredness resulting from prolonged
overtime.

A third of staff questioned for a Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) survey also admitted that working long hours negatively affects their per formance and morale.

In the Police Service some 70% of officers working more
than 48 hours a week begrudge the leisure and hobby time they miss, and almost half of the working population is plagued
by the strain working long hours puts on our relationships. (CIPD Working Time Regulations: Calling time on working time? May 2004)

Time for change: lean employee resourcing
By applying the principles of lean manufacturing originally
developed in the automotive industry to workforce planning and
management, and implementing a “lean employee resourcing”
(Lean-ER) strategy, the police could slash its overtime spend,
and increase productivity and workforce flexibility.

Ultimately, the concept of lean employee resourcing adds value
by driving out waste and reducing cost while ensuring that
cover levels meet the demand.

Lean-ER draws on the concepts of lean, annualisation and
demand-led rostering, using a range of powerful consultancy and software tools to drive real change and, therefore, eliminate labour underutilisation, reactive labour management,
inappropriate shift patterns and poor holiday administration.

All of this can even be achieved despite the attendant
complexities, local nuances and demands of policing as a profession; lean employee resourcing has successfully transformed other emergency-service organisations beyond recognition.

East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS), for example,
partnered with Working Time Solutions to investigate its volatile
workload, identify trends and evaluate the efficiency of its
existing shift patterns in order to move to a leaner model and
eliminate its dependency on overtime and “bank” staff.

General Manager Andy Magee of Patient Transport Services
at EMAS explains that, like the Police Service, EMAS provides
a highly complex and time-pressured service to the millions
of people that live across the various counties that make up
a region.

He said: “We employ over 3,000 staff at 70 locations,
with the majority working as accident and emergency personnel
responding to 500,000 calls every year. In the same way as the police, our demand for labour is extremely multifaceted and any new way of managing our workforce had to acknowledge our commitment to service and national performance targets.”

A leaner model of employee resourcing had to accommodate
new staff, reduce reliance on overtime, work in line with
EMAS’ cultural shift towards team working, and reduce employees’ hours to 37.5 per week in line with the Agenda for
Change.

EMAS also wanted to address issues such as low levels of staff
satisfaction, as staff regularly found themselves under-utilised
during slack periods, but peaks of high activity meant that meal
breaks were often missed and fatigue levels were high.

Through working staid, traditional patterns, service levels
had declined due to a lack of staff availability, and stress had
also become an issue.

Finding a solution
Working Time Solutions worked with EMAS to implement a
lean-employee resourcing system that utilised some of the
theory of annualised hours, to address these issues and match demand patterns to the EMAS’ supply of labour.

Reviewing historic data from all of EMAS’ ambulance stations
enabled a better understanding of demand, then shift patterns
were developed that would meet the peaks and troughs of that demand. Expressing the weekly contract in an equivalent number of hours per year greatly increased EMAS’ flexibility and
helped the innovative design of rosters.

These techniques have been used successfully in the private
sector for many years in both manufacturing and service industries at companies such as Coca Cola, GlaxoSmithKline and
the RAC.

The ambulance and police services, where volatile demand
during antisocial hours (dictated by popular drinking times) is
commonplace, really puts lean shift-pattern models to the test. Thanks to the models’ scalable and robust nature, they have
emerged unscathed from the Ambulance Service to present
significant advantages for other emergency services.

EMAS’ new lean-employee resourcing rotas are self-managed,
meaning that staff are now able to trade shifts in order to suit
their leisure time and holiday arrangements, while ensuring that cover levels are maintained at all times.

Andy Magee concludes: “Our staff’s improved work-life balance
has given rise to large reductions in sickness levels and has helped EMAS successfully fulfil its Agenda for Change requirements while maintaining per formance levels against all
call categories.

“There have also been substantial cost benefits; we have
saved £250,000 in disturbed meal-break allowances alone
since the new shift patterns and rota management schemes
were introduced.”

Final thoughts
Research has already proven that in real terms, a lean or variable shift arrangement offers the best demand-supply match on over 80% of basic command units in the Police Service.

This could provide up to 70% more officers on duty at peak
times than traditional shift patterns with a flat supply, meaning
that 2,500 officers nationally would be deployed far more
effectively.

Lean employee resourcing in the Police Service could also
offer up a much-improved worklife balance, more attractive
patterns for officers, reduced overtime cost and improved
peak cover for management.

More proactive workforce planning and robust management
techniques and systems could mean more officers in the
public eye and less crime.

Research and recommendations were made on this subject
almost six years ago now, but have only come to fruition in
small pockets of the Police Service, so major opportunities still
exist for response teams, traffic patrols, control rooms and many other areas of police activity.

Poor understanding of shiftplanning techniques and the
demand for cover, coupled with a resistance to change, must be overcome to provide more costeffective and service-oriented policing – hopefully the time is now.

Top Back to Features Home