Changing shift patterns at work

[user1097712]

Hi after some advice. I have recently taken on a new job managing a team of 6. All but one are full time.
The part time member of staff currently works mornings however the afternoons are busier and I need her to work these.
I spoke to her about needing to change her shift pattern and she ended up getting upset. The reason she works mornings is due to been ill (cancer diagnosis) a few years ago which I didn’t know. She explained that she experiences bad fatigue in the afternoon.
Can anyone advise on the best way to deal with this?
Thanks

Hello, have you not got an HR team/advisor at work? They would be your best port of call really. I would expect them to say that it's really difficult and frankly inadvisable in most circumstances to try to force changes to existing flexible working practices as these form part of the contract of employment (whether explicitly in writing or by 'custom and practice'). It just being more convenient for you/the business for a member of staff to work different hours isn't usually enough of a justification (and even more so given that this lady has a disability requiring reasonable adjustments). So unless it really is causing you such a huge issue to be short in the afternoons that you can't actually deliver what you need to do (and you can demonstrably prove it), I think you need to be looking at other solutions and involving the whole team in these rather than making it all the problem of this one employee - how did your predecessor manage things as they don't appear to have wanted to change things in the same way?

Obviously I don't know your business so don't know how practical this would be but can you rearrange some work so as to redistribute workload more into the mornings - can any preparation or pre-work be done in the morning to make the afternoon more efficient for instance? If you have an appointments based system could it be as simple as reducing afternoon appointment slots and adding additional morning ones? Or if you have any vacancies in the full-time staff members could you instead recruit 2 x 0.5 time staff to do afternoons only therefore having the same effect as getting this lady to swap to afternoons. Or would some/all of your staff be interested in shifting their hours to increase afternoon staffing - not necessarily drastically so but if say someone works 8-4 currently could they do 9-5 or 10-6 to help out a bit, maybe not even every day of the week?