COMPENSATION FOR INCONVENIENCE - THE UTILITY OF SHIFT SYSTEMS

This study is parr of a larger study aimed at the development of a sys tem for quantifying the inconvenience of shift schedules and schedule characteristics. The results can be used to reduce inconvenience (coun ter-value compensation) and to compute the monetary (counter-weight) c ompensability of shift schedules. The results presented here show that consensus exists among subjects from different organizations and with different background characteristics on the utility of several featur es, e.g. working at inconvenient hours, the irregularity of a schedule , and working during the evening (which has a positive value). The opi nions slightly differ with respect to some other characteristics, such as very long shifts, work during the weekend and the average sequence length. The differences are possibly due to job characteristics.