Exploring a 'new' way of working with Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours
This report looks in detail at a resourcing framework that could help solve many of the challenges facing UK Plc.
Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours is an established and proven way of organising shift working that, despite its clear benefits, has become somewhat maligned over the years and is yet to be adopted by many employers.
However, faced with the urgent need to improve productivity, flexibility and employee well-being, it’s time organisations across the public and private sector re-appraised this system.
This report explores the past and future of Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours, looking at the fundamentals of the system, the benefits it delivers and some of the misconceptions held by employers, employees and other stakeholders.
It also looks at the importance of effective planning and employee engagement to enable successful adoption.
Over the best part of three decades Working Time Solutions has developed Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours systems that have helped clients deliver well over £100 million in combined savings, protected thousands of jobs and ensured high services levels are maintained.
We are convinced that this approach holds the key to addressing some fundamental issues around productivity and working conditions for the UK’s 4.8 million shift workers.
There are numerous variations of Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours systems but put simply it is a means of calculating employees’ working time and pay over the course of a standard year, rather than by the week.
Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours can be complicated to understand and administer and consequently the success of such arrangements lies in effective planning and management of the system.
We hope this report provides some clarity on the topic and encourages more organisations to consider this alternative resourcing model.

1. Brexit, the productivity puzzle and precarious employment
2. The fundamentals of Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours
3. A misunderstood approach
4. Planning to succeed
5. Bringing employees with you
1. Brexit, the productivity puzzle and precarious employment
Employers face a perfect storm of strategic workforce challenges created by economic volatility, globalisation, changing demographics, rising costs, legislation and increasing scrutiny.
Having stabilised after the financial crisis and subsequent recession, many organisations are looking at how to manage through rises to the National Living Wage, Brexit and the impact of legislation such as ‘The Good Work Plan’. All of this whilst supporting job security and the well-being of their workers.
The fluid situation created by leaving the EU will require employers to increase their productivity and flexibility if they are to thrive, or even survive, in an uncertain post-Brexit world.
You can read more about the workforce planning and management challenges it poses in our white paper.
Ultimately, with the average worker in France and Germany producing more in four days than the average UK worker does in five, the UK needs to address its productivity gap if it is to make a success of Brexit.
In addition to economic and political upheaval, societal and technological change is drastically altering the shape and nature of demand.
We’ve seen exponential growth in the use of zero hours contracts and agency workers with many organisations’ operational models becoming reliant on them.
In a Guardian article Neil Carberry, Director for People and Skills at the Confederation of British Industry said: “One of the attractions of flexible contract options for businesses is being able to meet more volatile demand patterns in increasingly 24/7 markets”.
However, referred to as ‘Precarious Employment’ by the media, this approach to resourcing regularly creates reputational issues for employers and is increasingly under scrutiny.
The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices (The Good Work Plan) has begun to influence Government policy in this area with a slew of new legislation including giving workers the right to request a more stable contract.
Under ‘The Good Work Plan’ all employees and workers with varying hours and shift patterns (including agency and zero hours workers) will be able to formally request a more fixed working pattern after 26 weeks of work for the same employer.
Over the past few years, we’ve also seen significant rulings on both holiday pay/overtime and travel to work time.
The potential for further changes to working time legislation (related to Brexit or precarious employment) is a further consideration for organisations trying to find solutions which will be fit for purpose now and in an uncertain future.
Employers need to take a long hard look at their resourcing models and ask whether they are fit for purpose and whether it can respond quickly and effectively to change.
As John F. Kennedy said:
“There is nothing more certain and unchanging than uncertainty and change.”
2. The fundamentals of Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours
History:
You can trace Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours’ roots back to experimental labour models which were pioneered in the Scandinavian paper industry during the mid-1970s.
Their principal aim was to limit the use of overtime and to increase leisure opportunities for the workforce. The success with which it achieved this saw the new approach adopted across many industries and territories.
Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours first found its way to the UK in the early 1980s in response to increased holidays and reductions in basic working hours agreed within largely continuous process-based industries. It gained notoriety in the early 1990s as businesses used it to respond to challenging market conditions by reorganising and reducing working time.
The move from a mutually beneficial labour model to blunt cost cutting tool has done little to help its widespread adoption over the past two decades.
However, when planned, designed and implemented properly, Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours remains one of the most efficient and effective means of ensuring an organisation and its employees’ interests remain aligned.
The need:
Shift patterns are often tied to legacy working practices or institutionalised habits.
These can bear little resemblance to the fluid situations an organisation faces, ultimately creating harmful misalignment between demand and the supply of labour.
Inflexible shift patterns are often at the heart of resourcing issues, with models meeting neither the demand the organisation is experiencing or the needs of the employees.
- Over-supply creates inefficiencies which can lead to job losses and skills drain.
- Under-supply generates reliance on expensive peripheral temporary forms of labour such as overtime and agency staff. Typically, overtime is non-contractual and therefore reliant on goodwill.
- In many instances, imbalance of supply and demand leads to employee stress or sickness and breaches of working time or health and safety legislation.
Furthermore, traditional forms of working can actively encourage low productivity, high waste and poor service by financially rewarding the working of additional hours. Rather than viewing overtime as a temporary measure to overcome exceptional circumstances, many managers and employees see it as a regular day-to-day element of their working lives.
Looking at how overtime is worked within an organisation, it is often the case that 80% of overtime hours are worked by 20% of the workforce.
At a manufacturing site owned by Unilever, prior to the introduction of Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours, there were times when employees used to ‘know’ on a Tuesday that they would be required to work overtime on a Saturday; it was planned!
Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours is a proven and effective solution to this problem.
Adopting this approach enables truly responsive resourcing models to be created using shift patterns that ensure exactly the right amount of resource is available at exactly the time it is needed.

Put simply, Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised hours is a means of calculating employees’ working time and pay over the course of a standard year, rather than by the week.
Expressing an ‘hours per week’ contract in terms of the equivalent number of hours over a year provides much more flexibility.
It is the key to ensuring the supply of labour can be aligned to the anticipated demand over any given period.
For employees, a yearly salary is paid on a regular basis but hours worked can vary, as they are dictated by demand.
The system is designed so that shift workers are rostered only when they are needed, thereby eliminating idle time.
Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours systems are based on five fundamental elements:
1. Forecast: Business analysis provides a baseline by quantifying the ‘target’ number of hours needed for the year to meet demand.
2. Profile: Total hours are assigned to reflect flat or fluctuating demand profiles which occur over the year (this can be targeted right down to in-day variations).
3. Supply: The ‘target’ number of hours can be divided by the optimal annual contract size to arrive at the theoretical number of employees and team structures that will be required to meet the forecasted demand.
4. Design: Using the forecast, profile and supply calculations, a set of operating principals can be designed which can be applied to a range of Working Time areas such as shift patterns, contracts, reserve hour rules and holiday procedures. These will be tailored to the specific needs of the organisation, its predicted demand profile, legislative requirements and workforce demographics.
5. Engagement: Employees should be meaningfully involved in the planning, design, implementation and ongoing management of the system. They are the ones who will be working the patterns and will be crucial to its success.
As we’ll explore in the next part of this report, regular reviews of these fundamental elements are essential to ensure Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours systems remain aligned to the needs of the whole organisation.

As we’ll explore in the next part of this report, regular reviews of these fundamental elements are essential to ensure Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours systems remain aligned to the needs of the whole organisation.
The benefits:

Well implemented and administered Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours systems can deliver clear benefits for employers and employees.
At Unilever, the introduction of this approach led to significant change in culture and performance. The organisation took a thorough and sensitive approach and the workforce subsequently showed a high level of trust and motivation, anticipating the introduction of future changes with a positive attitude.
Likewise, at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, the organisation was able to reduce labour costs whilst employees benefitted from better visibility of their scheduled shifts and improved work-life balance thanks to shorter shifts and shorter working weeks during quieter periods.
To achieve this success, it’s vital to ensure that any system is implemented in a way which complies with an employer’s legal obligations.
Working in partnership with the Employment Team at Pannone Corporate LLP, we set out clear responses to some of the criticisms levelled in the BBC article referenced above:
- Compliance with National Minimum Wage (NMW) legislation: If an organisation is operating a standard Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours arrangement where employees are paid a set weekly salary for a set number of hours over the course of the year (albeit that the hours worked from week to week vary), then this counts as “salaried work” for the purposes of the NMW legislation. Provided that the employer pays the NMW for the average weekly hours worked, then there is nothing unlawful about this arrangement, even if workers are receiving less than the NMW for the hours actually worked in a particular week.
- Indirect discrimination: Many Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours arrangements incorporate an element of flexing up - prescribed periods during which employees know that they may be required to increase their hours at short notice. An employer should make sure that where this sort of practice disadvantages an employee because of a particular “protected characteristic” (such as sex), and also disadvantages other employees who share that protected characteristic in the same way, the arrangements can be justified as being a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim” to avoid the risk of indirect discrimination. This will involve balancing the aims of the business with any detrimental impact on the particular group of employees, such as women with childcare commitments, and considering whether there are alternative ways to achieve those aims which will reduce any such detrimental impact.
Working Time Solutions’ experience over the past three decades indicates that a major barrier to adoption of Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours is often a lack of commitment.
Despite the clear benefits (including significant year-on-year ROI), many organisations put working time change in the ‘too challenging’ category of organisational transformation projects.
There is no denying that this is a highly complex and sensitive area, but it is also one of the most fundamentally important to productivity and employee wellbeing.
Adoption of Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours is not as simple as flicking a switch. Planning is essential to ensure the ground is prepared, hurdles are anticipated and that you have a roadmap that guides implementation and ongoing management of the system.


Engaging employees during the shift design phase of a Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours project can also support implementation and strengthen outcomes.
Real-time interactive planning tools help employees visualise the impact of shift changes on their lives and give them the power to experiment with variants.
A collaborative process can unlock valuable insights that help create optimal solutions for the organisation and its employees.
This ultimately leads to a level of employee ownership over new patterns which embeds Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours and supports continuous improvement.
What now?
Hopefully the insight and information in this report has helped you better understand Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours.
This is a specialist area of workforce planning and management, so Working Time Solutions can provide a number of routes to continue your shift work transformation journey.
Benefits calculator:
Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours will save you time & money, whilst improving employee engagement & well-being.
We’ve developed an online ROI calculator that will outline the potential benefits you could generate by planning, scheduling & managing efficient shift patterns, rotas and rosters.
See how much money you could save by reducing overtime, agency use, absence rates and workforce management administration and use the calculator to start building a compelling business case today.
Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours Clinic
Our clinics provide the opportunity to discuss Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours in more detail with one of our highly experienced workforce planning and management consultants.
These free, confidential 1-2-1 consultations provide an opportunity to discuss your current ways of working and explore what the best course of action might be for your organisation.
Places are limited so use the booking form on our website to secure your own Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours Clinic.
Workforce Planning Masterclass
Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours is a key topic at our Workforce Planning Masterclass taking place on the 14th May 2020 in Manchester.
Over the past 15 years, Working Time Solutions’ Masterclass has established itself as a key event for employers looking to design, implement and manage optimised shift patterns and rota schedules.
It’s an opportunity acquire valuable, actionable learnings from shift working experts and hear detailed case studies from industry leaders who are adopting Demand-Led Rostering and Annualised Hours.
Click here for more information and to book your place.