PAY CHECK You'll reduce paying staff overtime when you end your pay period on the slowest day of the week.

Salary Saver
One Simple Trick to Reduce Staff Overtime

By adjusting our workweek from Monday-Friday to Tuesday-Monday, we've all but eliminated paying staff overtime. If your facility is anything like our 2 pediatric surgery centers, the caseloads ramp up as the week progresses. We often don't perform procedures on Mondays, yet we'd schedule nurses to work a full shift despite there being little to do. Meanwhile, staff often work longer than 8 hours on Thursdays and Fridays, when our ORs are packed. By the time the end of the week rolled around, they'd accrued upwards of 13 hours of overtime.

Shifting the end of the pay period from Fridays to Mondays lets us know how close each nurse is to the 40-hour mark. When staff realize they're about to be working overtime, we'll let salaried staff members take their places. For example, nurses who work 8 hours on Tuesday (the new beginning of the pay period), 8 hours on Wednesday and 11 hours on Thursday and Friday come in on Monday knowing they can pull cases for 2 hours to total a 40-hour workweek and then go home. Our nurses appreciate having Monday as a short day so they can run errands or enjoy the time off.

Carol Trokanski, BSN, CASC
Pediatric Surgery Centers
Odessa and Tampa, Fla.
[email protected]