Where to put breaks and lunches so the curve stays covered
Breaks are shrinkage inside the interval. How to see what they do to the requirement, stagger them into the troughs, and check a break plan with the fit calculator.
Published
Every roster has a second curve hidden inside it: the agents actually on the phones after breaks, lunches and coaching are taken out. A roster that covers the requirement on paper can be short in every interval that has a break in it, and the intervals with breaks in them are chosen by habit. This guide is how to see the second curve and put the breaks where the requirement allows.
Breaks are shrinkage inside the interval
A fifteen-minute break in a thirty-minute interval takes half an agent out of that interval. Twenty agents on the same break at 10:30 take ten out of the 10:30 interval, and the requirement curve does not know they are gone. This is why a planning shrinkage of 30 per cent can still leave an interval short: the shrinkage is right on average and wrong at 10:30.
The fix is not a bigger shrinkage figure. It is to place the breaks against the curve, so the intervals that lose agents to breaks are the ones that had spare agents.
Find the slack
Run the requirement for the day, then subtract it from the agents on shift in each interval. The result is the slack curve: positive where you can afford people off the phones, zero or negative where you cannot. For a double-peaked day the slack is at opening, at lunch and after the afternoon peak, and it is almost never at 11:00.
Breaks go into the slack. Fifteen-minute breaks two hours into a shift are a convention, not a requirement; two and a half hours into a shift that started at 08:00 is 10:30, which is the peak. Stagger them from 09:45 to 11:15 in five-minute steps and the same number of breaks takes one or two agents out of each interval instead of ten out of one.
Lunches are the hard case
Lunch is longer, so it takes a whole agent out of an interval, and everybody wants it at the same time. The requirement curve usually dips at 13:00 for the same reason customers are eating too, which helps, but the dip is rarely as deep as a whole team’s worth of lunches. Spread lunches from 12:00 to 14:30 by shift start, earliest starters first, and check the 12:00 and 14:00 intervals, which are where lunch plans fail.
Check the plan
Take the agents required per interval from the week planner and the agents rostered per interval after breaks are removed, and paste both into the schedule efficiency calculator below. The shortfall intervals are where the breaks landed on the peak; the surplus intervals are where they should have gone.
1 − (over + under) ÷ required. 100% means every interval matches.
- Rostered, needed
- Rostered, surplus
- Shortfall
- Required
- Coverage
- 103.4%
- Over-staffed
- 19.0 h
- Under-staffed
- 8.5 h
- Intervals short
- 10 of 24
- Required hours
- 305.5 h
- Rostered hours
- 316.0 h
Rostered hours ÷ required hours.
Agent-hours above the requirement.
Agent-hours below it.
Worst: 12:30, 4 short.
Show the working
- 24 intervals of 30 minutes: required 305.5 agent-hours, rostered 316.0.
- Coverage = 316.0 ÷ 305.5 = 103.4%.
- Interval by interval, the roster is over by 19.0 h and under by 8.5 h.
- Fit = 1 − (19.0 + 8.5) ÷ 305.5 = 91.0%.
Rosters that fit the curve are what a scheduler is for. Pebble WFM builds the roster against the requirement and publishes it. Free month, no card needed.
Coaching, meetings and training follow the same rule
They are longer breaks with a business reason, and they belong in the troughs for the same arithmetic. A team meeting at 10:00 on a Monday is the single most expensive hour in the week for a consumer line; the same meeting at 15:30 on a Thursday costs almost nothing. The requirement curve is the argument, and a planner who can show it wins it.
Where next
- How to measure schedule efficiency: the fit measure that catches misplaced breaks.
- How to calculate contact centre shrinkage: breaks as a share of paid time, and why the average is not enough.
Frequently asked questions
- Should breaks be fixed or flexible?
- Fixed in the roster, movable by the planner. Agents need to know when their break is; the planner needs to move it when the day runs hot. A break window of thirty minutes either side, published in advance, gives both.
- How many agents can be on break at once?
- As many as the interval's slack allows. If the requirement is 40 on the phones and 46 are on shift, six can be off. In the peak half hour the answer is usually nobody, which is why breaks stagger into the shoulders.
Stop doing this one interval at a time
Pebble WFM forecasts your demand, computes the staffing requirement for every interval, builds the roster and publishes it, with self-service for agents and a copilot that can do what a planner can. Explore a sample organisation on day one.