Shift planning: How to manage airport shifts effectively

Airport shift planning is a complex task — especially in and around an airport. Airport shift planning is not only crucial for maintaining smooth operations: it’s just as crucial for ensuring passenger satisfaction and meeting regulatory requirements.

From check-in and security to baggage handling, coordinating airport staffing requires careful planning to minimize delays, optimize labor costs, and deliver a seamless experience for travelers 24/7.
In this article, we’ll cover what shift management is, the challenges of airport shift planning, and how automated shift management can benefit your airport.

What is shift management?

Shift management, also known as shift planning or rostering, is the process of organizing work shifts for employees to ensure that the organization’s — in this case, the airport’s — needs are met while balancing workloads and availability.

Airport shift planning has unique complexities. Airport operations run 24/7, and with seasonal fluctuations, peak hours, and high stakes in ensuring safety and efficiency, effective shift planning plays an essential role in ensuring seamless operations every day.

Key elements of airport shift planning include:

• Demand forecasting: Staffing needs fluctuate based on flight schedules, passenger traffic peaks, and seasonal surges, and high-traffic times require additional staff across various departments – especially check-in, security, and baggage handling. Airports use historical data and airline schedules to predict peak staffing needs.
• Shift optimization: To avoid shortages and excesses, airport staff levels must align with flight times. Shift optimization is about managing peak and non-peak hours effectively to minimize idle time for employees while ensuring enough coverage for busy times.
• Compliance and labor laws: Airports must adhere to both general labor laws and specific aviation-related safety regulations. For example, regulations might mandate minimum rest periods between shifts to prevent fatigue – this is particularly crucial for roles like air traffic controllers and ground crew.
• Overtime and cost management: Airport shifts can easily extend due to flight delays, weather conditions, or increased passenger traffic. This makes avoiding overtime an important focus, as excessive overtime can lead to both fatigue and higher operational costs.

You might also be interested in: Airport operations 101

The challenges of airport shift planning

Shift planning in airports faces several unique challenges that make it important for all of the elements above to run seamlessly.

These include:

• Skills and certification requirements: Many airport roles require specific skills, training, and certifications. Shift planning must account for staff qualifications to ensure the right mix of certified staff per shift.
• Unpredictable delays: Weather, maintenance issues, and security alerts can cause shifts to be extended or changed last minute, making it crucial to maintain a dynamic and flexible schedule to respond to changes in real time.
• Passenger satisfaction and operational efficiency: Staff allocation must ensure that passengers experience smooth check-in, security screening, and boarding processes, making it crucial to balance passenger satisfaction with both operational and cost efficiency.
• Cross-functional coordination: A bottleneck in one area of airport operations can have a cascading effect on others. For shift planning to work effectively, it must be coordinated across departments, making it essential to streamline communication across airport operations to ensure that everyone is informed of changes or delays.

Because of these challenges, shift planning in airports requires a robust, adaptive approach to meet both the operational demands and regulatory requirements of the industry.

In most airports, however, shift planning is still done the same way it has been for decades. Typically, the process relies on legacy software or manual spreadsheets and the instincts and insights of a few key planners.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. At Copenhagen Optimization, we’re taking airport operations into the future — and shift planning is coming with us.

Better Shift: How automated shift management can benefit your airport

Manual shift planning is not only time consuming. It’s highly dependent on the presence and availability of individual employees, making it fragile and prone to breakdown when demand surges or key planners depart. With Better Shift, however, these problems are a thing of the past.

Better Shift is a cloud-based SaaS solution accessible through your preferred web browser. The solution is simple to use, can be deployed for any department at any time, and integrates seamlessly with your workforce management solution.

With Better Shift, you can automate shift management to streamline scheduling, ensure regulatory compliance, and optimize staffing levels at your airport — all of which are essential for ensuring efficient airport operations.

The benefits are numerous:

• Enhanced operational efficiency: Better Shift uses predictive analytics to align staff schedules with passenger flow and flight schedules, ensuring the right people are in the right place at the right time.
• Real-time adjustments and flexibility: Better Shift enables real-time adjustments to accommodate last-minute changes such as flight delays, cancellations, and emergencies, allowing you to accommodate these changes without extensive manual rework.
• Compliance with labor laws and safety regulations: Automating shift planning with Better Shift allows you to catch potential compliance and safety issues around scheduling before they occur. This helps you prevent fatigue-related risks and ensure compliance with government regulations.
• Overtime management: With Better Shift, you can reduce unnecessary labor costs by managing and minimizing overtime and scheduling the minimum necessary staff during slower periods. You can also ensure your staff receive their preferred shifts more often, improving both employee satisfaction and the passenger experience.
• Data-driven decision making: Better Shift provides data on staffing patterns, demand trends, and productivity metrics. You can use this information to improve future scheduling decisions, optimize staffing, and identify areas needing improvement.
• Reduced scheduling errors: Automating shift planning minimizes human error and reduces the time required to manage scheduling. This helps you reduce the administrative workload and free up managers to focus on other tasks.

And much, much more. Better Shift makes it easy to manage the complexities of shift planning, ensuring your rosters will cover fluctuations in short, medium, and long-term demands as well as seasonal changes.

Connected Operations: Optimize shift planning at your airport

Better Shift is part of Better Airport®: a cloud-based airport management SaaS platform that gives airports of all sizes a simpler way to run core operations.

As a common operating platform, Better Airport provides a single source of truth for optimizing operations and enables everyone you collaborate with, internally and externally, to easily access and use all functionality.

Featuring nine core modules for airport optimization, Better Airport allows airports to mix and match modules to create a solution perfectly suited to the specific needs of the individual airport.

Every module can be connected, making it easy to forecast, understand, and plan shifts, passenger flows, and baggage flows throughout the airport. We call this way of working Connected Operations — and we believe it’s the future of airport operations.

Read more about Connected Operations here.

Enter the future of airport operations with Copenhagen Optimization

Imagine an airport where your operations are connected; an airport where shift planning runs seamlessly every day and the passenger experience isn’t marked by stress and unnecessary delays, but instead centers around excitement for the journey ahead. At Copenhagen Optimization, we want to help you achieve just that.