Night Operations Scheduling and Timesheets Policy

Revised September 13, 2006
Additional minor updates Sep 2020

• Timesheet entry should only be done during scheduled work hours, ie, during day TO, overlap nights, or on cloudy nights.
• Up to two hours of time on the time sheet may be entered for checking e-mail each week. This free-form time is required to allow people to look for changes to meeting times, requests for schedule changes and other important pieces of information.
• Night work is now defined as sunset to sunrise. There is a summary of night lengths here. You should enter the larger of either this value or the actual number of hours worked. Optionally, you may use 12 (really, 11.5) hours per night since this is the average night length over the course of the year.
• No one is to work more than 15 hours in a given day.
  • Example: If you worked Monday night for fifteen hours, then you are excused from attending the Tuesday staff meeting.
  • Thus: In summer it is quite possible for you to do both OPS followed by night TO as long as it totals no more than 15 hours.
• There should never be more than 75 hours in a row on a timesheet.
  • This can be five 15 hour nights or nine 8 hour days. After 75 hours, you must take a day or two off.
  • RAs, this includes the case in which you have a run of personal research time perhaps coming right after an HET run.
• OPS Engineering for RAs is counted as long as it takes (0.75 to 2 hours depending on the day) and for TOs is from the start of OPS until sunset.
• Day TO work is always counted as four hours on the timesheet as the scheduled period of time is defined to be from 1PM to 5PM weekdays.
• Overlap is scheduled time of a minimum of one hour (and a maximum of four hours) the night before you are to go on duty, the purpose being to catch up on what has befallen the telescope since the last time you worked. Between 50-70% of the time, you are expected to appear in person for your overlap time. Depending on circumstances, there may be times when you were on duty recently enough that a telephone call for your overlap is sufficient.
  • Optionally, you may do part of your “overlap” during the day before you are scheduled to work if you feel the need to touch bases with the day staff.
• If you miss any scheduled work time (night work, night overlap, DAY TO, OPS, or staff meetings) then you are to take sick time to make up the hours, ie, you must be sick to miss scheduled work hours.
  • This includes meetings and any part of your day TO time, ie. you miss a meeting or are late for day TO work.
• If you are called at home for troubleshooting or other work-related issues, you charge a minimum unit of time, half an hour.
• Although most of your hours are scheduled (on average approximately 36 hours a week for a TO and 34 hours a week for an RA), there are also unscheduled hours to bring the total to forty hours in a week, on average. These unscheduled hours are to be spent doing assigned tasks as designated by your supervisor (or supervisor-approved staff).
• All TOs must work with all RAs. The reasons for this rule are three-fold:
  1. Everyone must be familiar with working with everyone else.
  2. No favoritism or discrimination in setting the schedule.
  3. The supervisor must be able to work with each TO in order to evaluate each TO’s work performance.
• Shift trading is still allowed between TOs and between RAs, but must not violate any of the rules in this document. Thus supervisor may choose to end shift trading and begin setting the schedule at any time.
• Professional development plans and time must be approved by the supervisor on a semester/mid-year evaluation interval.
• Exceptions to any of the above listed rules can only be made by the supervisor on a case by case basis.