More Than One Site

Multi-site operations gain flexibility by moving people between locations, and the gain is smaller than it looks unless the four costs are handled.

Travel time

Between sites during a shift is usually working time and frequently unpaid in practice.

Between home and a different-than-usual site can attract different treatment, and in some jurisdictions the extra distance is compensable.

Decide the rule and state it, because the informal version is resolved in the employer's favour by default and noticed by everyone.

Consent and expectation

A person hired for one site who is regularly rota'd to another has had their job changed.

Where the contract specifies a location, moving them needs agreement.

Where it does not, an expectation still forms, and the person who always says yes is the one who gets moved.

Ask, rotate, and record who has covered elsewhere — the concentration is invisible otherwise.

Familiarity

A covering person is slower for the first hours: different layout, different stock, different regulars, different till configuration.

Which means one covering body is not one local body, and a rota that treats them as equivalent under-staffs the shift.

Build in the difference or accept that the shift runs short in practice.

Divergent practice

Two sites develop different tolerances within a year: notice periods, swap approval, how readily shifts are cut.

And the difference is discovered in a grievance about consistency.

Compare the practices annually, which takes twenty minutes and reliably finds something.

What to centralise and what not

Centralise: the constraints — rest rules, minor limits, capability requirements, notice periods, predictability pay triggers.

Leave local: who works which shift, because the site manager knows the people.

Centralise visibility: one view of who is scheduled where, so double-booking becomes impossible.

The commonest error is the reverse — centralised allocation with local constraint interpretation — which produces rotas that fit the model and not the site.

The measure

Cross-site shifts per person per quarter, which finds the concentration.

Predictability pay by site, compared, which finds the manager who publishes late.

And notice period actually achieved by site, which is the number that differs most and is easiest to fix.

Track cross-site shifts per person

Because the concentration is invisible otherwise.

The person who always says yes is the one who keeps being moved.

Count it quarterly, with the travel time it involved.

And state the travel rule — paid or not, from where — because the informal version resolves in the employer's favour by default and everyone notices.

Turn the principle into a test

For a concrete product reference, remote workforce management software can help turn the principle above into a test. Verify the current behaviour in a trial and judge the record it creates, not the wording on the page.