Home › Rotating shifts › Which squad should I bid?
Rotation tools
Which squad should I bid?
At bid time you are choosing a crew, not a rotation. On half the common patterns that choice decides every weekend of your year.
Once you know which crew you are bidding, save the rotation once and the year fills itself in.
Why this matters more than the rotation does
Ask an officer what they work and they will name the pattern. But on any cycle whose length divides by seven — seven days, fourteen, twenty-eight — the pattern never drifts. It lands on the same weekdays for ever, and the only thing separating one crew from another is where in the cycle they sit.
One crew has every Saturday and Sunday of the year. Another has none. Same rotation, same agency, same sergeant.
What to ask before you sign the bid sheet
- Which crew is the position on, not just which rotation?
- Where does that crew sit in the cycle right now?
- Does the agency rotate crews through positions, or do they stay put?
Relief lines, holiday rotations and local agreements all bend this. Your bid sheet and your collective agreement decide what is actually on offer — this shows you what the arithmetic of the pattern allows.
The short version
Ten of the twenty-one common rotations run on cycles of seven, fourteen or twenty-eight days. Those never drift: they land on the same weekdays for ever, so your crew decides which weekends you get, and the range across crews runs from none to every one of them.
The other eleven run on cycles that do not divide by seven. Those drift through the week, everybody takes a turn, and the crew you are on barely matters to the yearly total.
The other tools
- Which rotation am I on? — tap out your roster and find its name
- Weekends off — all 21 rotations, counted out
- Everything else — the full set
Stop working it out on paper
Save your rotation once and the year fills itself in — and the person who needs to see it can have it on their own phone.
Scan to install
