Every year CIRCADIAN invites managers of shiftwork operations to tell us about their operations in an online survey. The information is used to identify trends and a snapshot of the current state of the shiftwork world.

One of the questions we ask is: “What shift length is worked by the majority of your shiftworkers?”

Below are the answers of about 400 facilities from the last survey:

What shift length is worked at your facility?

As the chart above shows 8s and 12s are about equally common followed by combinations of 8s and 12s.  We see 10-hr shifts used mostly in operations that do not run 24 hours a day, e.g. food manufacturing and processing which requires a daily shutdown of production and cleaning of the equipment.