Shift, attendance and leave rules that hold up in property and facility management

A building does not close at six. The lift must run at midnight, the pump room must hold pressure before dawn and the fire panel must be watched on Sundays. So shift rules in a facility firm are not an HR ornament. They decide whether an apartment complex has water at six in the morning.

List every post that must be filled at every hour on every site. Examples: gate guard and patrol, helpdesk, electrician on duty, plumber, lift technician on call, DG set operator, STP and pump room attendant, housekeeping supervisor, garden and pool staff, fire panel watcher, parking marshal. Mark which posts need a trained or licensed person and which can be filled by a general hand.

Next to each post, write the hours it must be covered and the minimum headcount. That table is the base. Leave rules, weekly offs and overtime are all built on it.

SITE ______________   MONTH ______

POST                     HOURS COVERED     MIN. HEADS   CERTIFIED?   RELIEVER.
Main gate and patrol     24 hours          3 per shift  no           ______
Helpdesk and complaint desk  8 am - 10 pm  2            no           ______
Electrician              24 hours on call  1            yes          ______
DG set operator          power cut cover   1            yes          ______
Lift technician          on call           1            yes          ______
Pump room and STP        6 am - 10 pm      1            trained      ______
Housekeeping             7 am - 4 pm       per floor    no           ______
Fire panel watch         24 hours          1            trained      ______

1. 1

   Fix the shift lengths

   Eight-hour blocks suit the helpdesk and the housekeeping crew. Gate guards and plant-room hands often work twelve-hour shifts with a half-hour overlap at the guard-room desk. Write down which post uses which pattern.

2. 2

   Rotate on a published cycle

   Night-round duty rotates weekly or fortnightly on a calendar pinned in the guard room and the pump-room. Nobody stays on nights just because they never objected.

3. 3

   Pair every post with a reliever

   The reliever pool covers weekly offs, sick leave and festival leave. Keep it larger than the number of weekly offs falling on a normal day, so one fever in the lift crew does not leave a tower unmanned.

4. 4

   Treat off-day work as compensatory time

   Where a person works on their weekly off to cover a gap, record it in a register and give a day back within an agreed period. Never let it vanish into goodwill.

5. 5

   Use a handover log

   The outgoing shift in-charge writes complaints open, meters read, tank levels, equipment faults and keys passed. The incoming in-charge signs.

Facility firms often hold attendance in three places: a biometric clock at the site office, a guard's notebook and the supervisor's phone. They rarely agree. Pick one as the master. Use biometric or app check-in for fixed posts and a signed register for sites without power or connectivity. At the start of each day, the site supervisor compares the muster roll with the handover log. Any name present in the log but absent on the roll is a query by lunch.

A manager for a apartment facility team has to cope with resident complaints that arrive at odd hours. An office park manager deals with tenants whose own staff come in at six and leave at midnight. The rules above fit both, with different tables.

• Planned leave: apply at least two weeks ahead for technical posts, one week for others, with a reliever named before approval.
• Festival and wedding peaks: publish a blocked-dates list for the year, and allow leave by rotation within it.
• Sudden sickness: call the shift in-charge or the control room before the shift starts. The in-charge notes the minute of the call and starts reliever cover from the standby list.
• Rain and bandh days: name in advance who must report, such as the pump-room operator, the DG set hand and the on-call electrician, and how the firm gets them to the gate.
• Silent absence: after the first hour, the supervisor tries three calls, informs the control room, asks the gate to keep the staff entry log open and sends the reliever.

If you would like a roster designed around your own sites, see our attendance, shift and leave process service.

A gated community peaks at dawn and dusk. Milk and newspaper vendors, school-bus pick-ups, maids and delivery riders all queue at the visitor-entry gate. The guard roster is heavy at those hours and light at midday. A tech park peaks around badge-access rush hours, valet-parking, cafeteria lunch, after-hours air-conditioning requests and tenant fit-out works that run at night under supervision.

So a single roster template will not do. Build one for each site type, then adjust for the housekeeping peaks after weekend community events or the quarter-end rush of tenant moves. A mall facility team adds festive late closings and shutter-down inspections.

Some posts are tied to equipment. The chiller plant, the cooling tower, the air-handling units and the transformer yard each need a logged round, whatever the headcount that day. The sump and overhead tank need a morning and evening level check, with chlorination dosing recorded. The fire hydrant pressure and sprinkler valve positions need a weekly walk. Escalators in a mall need a morning test run before the doors open.

Put each round on the roster as a named duty with a time. If the operator on a round is on leave, the reliever inherits the round, not a vague "cover". Keep a tool-crib and key-board register so spare keys for the panel rooms are not lost during a swap.

• Pre-monsoon week: check borewell pump, drain gratings, terrace outlets and generator fuel level, and keep the full reliever list at hand.
• Festival week: clubhouse bookings, extra visitor gate-pass checks and late housekeeping after community events.
• Summer peak: chiller load, lift-lobby cooling and water tanker bookings for sites with short supply.
• Audit week: the fire drill, the extinguisher refill tags and the lift inspection certificate must be at hand on site.

• Muster roll or attendance printout, signed by the supervisor weekly.
• Shift roster, with changes initialled.
• Compensatory-off and overtime register.
• Leave register with the reliever named.
• Handover log and control room call sheet.

For the wider context of property teams, see the property and facility management hub.