Other shapes
What each shape forces you to remove
The arrangement determines which removals are available, and the three entries on this record that a different shape would have handled differently show how.
The Friday clean-down of the workshopThe removal a compressed week cannot make
week 9 · crept back after 22 weeks
A named person on the phone until sixThe removal staggered cover is designed to avoid
week 7 · crept back after 5 weeks
Visits to the two furthest sitesThe removal a nine-day fortnight makes instead
week 7 · asked back after 12 weeks
Crept back 2Asked back 1
Three removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. Every one of them produced an event inside the 78 weeks watched. Of these, one was asked back and two crept back. Three removals that a different shape of week would have handled differently.
The useful way to compare these arrangements is not by hours. It is by which of your procedures each one puts on the table.
Three entries on this record illustrate it, because each would have been treated differently under a different shape.
The Friday clean-down
The workshop was cleaned down on Friday afternoons. Under a four-day week with Friday gone, it stopped — and stopped without anybody proposing it, because the slot ceased to exist.
Under compressed hours it does not stop. Friday still exists for somebody and the clean-down happens, possibly on a different day, possibly by a different person. There is nothing to remove.
Under a nine-day fortnight it does not stop either. Somebody is always there on a Friday. The clean-down might become fortnightly by drift, which is roughly where it ended up on this record anyway, but by a different route and without an entry on any list.
Under annualised hours it is deferred during busy periods and resumes, or does not.
So this is a removal that only one of the four arrangements makes, and it is the one that made it — which is why the record contains it at all.
A named person on the phone until six
Phone cover by a specific person each day. Under a four-day week with everybody off together, the pool shrank and this became a rota of four.
Under staggered cover of any kind — nine-day fortnight, or a four-day week with different days off — this removal is not made, because the pool does not shrink. The entry simply does not appear.
This is the clearest case of the arrangement determining the list. The procedure was not removed because it was unnecessary. It was removed because the arrangement made it impossible in its existing form, and a different arrangement would have left it alone.
Visits to the two furthest sites
Monthly visits, removed because the travel did not fit a four-day week. Argued about at the time, asked back at twelve weeks, reinstated at four a year.
Under compressed hours the long days make this removal unnecessary and arguably easier — a ten-hour day is a better shape for a long journey than an eight-hour one, and several organisations on compressed hours report exactly this.
Under a nine-day fortnight the same applies to a lesser degree.
So this is a removal that the four-day week forced and that two other arrangements would have avoided, and the record suggests the removal was about three quarters right: the visits mattered, the frequency did not.
The general rule
An arrangement puts procedures on the table in three ways, and only one of them has anything to do with whether the procedure is worth keeping.
- By removing the hours. The reduction has to come from somewhere, so some procedures must go. This is the intended mechanism and it is the only one that selects on value.
- By removing the slot. A procedure that lived in a particular part of the week stops when that part stops, regardless of its worth. Seven entries on this record.
- By thinning the pool. A procedure that needed several people available becomes impossible when fewer are, regardless of its worth. Three entries.
Only the first is a decision. The second and third are consequences of the shape, and together they accounted for ten of the thirty-eight entries here.
Choosing an arrangement is choosing which of your procedures will be removed for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they are any good.
How to use this before deciding
Take the arrangement you are considering and ask two questions of the existing week:
What lives in the part of the week that is going? Not procedures on a list — habits, slots, the half hour on a Friday. This produces the removals nobody will propose, which on this record were the two slowest failures.
What needs more people than will be available? This produces the removals that are forced by thinning rather than by hours, and they are the ones most likely to be restored at full weight later, because they were never unnecessary.
Both lists can be written before anything changes. Neither was written on this record, and both would have been short.
The removals an arrangement forbids
The mirror of the question is less obvious and sometimes more useful: which procedures does a given arrangement take off the table?
Compressed hours forbids almost nothing and therefore forces almost nothing. Whatever was happening carries on at a different time.
A staggered arrangement forbids removals that depend on everybody being absent. On this record one entry — the Friday clean-down — stopped precisely because nobody was there. Under staggered cover somebody is always there, so the thing carries on being done by whoever is in, which may be worse than either stopping it or keeping it properly.
A whole-organisation closed day forbids removals that depend on cover. Anything that could be reduced by sharing it more widely cannot be, because the pool is smaller on every working day.
That third one is the least obvious and it bit on this record. The phone cover could have been made lighter for everybody by spreading it across more people. A common day off made the pool smaller instead, so the available move was to concentrate it on four, which is the opposite direction.
An arrangement is not only a set of hours. It is a set of constraints on which solutions are reachable, and some of the reachable ones get closed off by the arrangement that was chosen to make things easier.