Sometimes the best insights come from the most unexpected moments. This one came from our team meeting on December 31st.
We don’t usually do staff meetings on New Year’s Eve. But this year was different. We’d grown the team, shipped some big updates, and I wanted us all in one room before the year ended. Nothing formal. Just coffee, some snacks, and a loose agenda: “How was 2024? What are we excited about for 2025?”
It started light. People shared wins. Talked about holidays. Someone joked about their New Year’s resolution to finally clean up their inbox.
Then one of our team members spoke up.
“Can I share something?” she said. “It’s kind of personal, but it’s been on my mind.”
The room got quiet.
The Hospital Rush
She told us about an emergency hospital visit over Christmas. A family member had a health scare. Nothing life-threatening, thankfully—but serious enough that they spent 14 hours in the ER.
“The medical stuff was stressful,” she said. “But honestly? What stuck with me was the nurses.”
She described watching them work. Shift after shift. Some had been there since the night before. One nurse told her she’d worked 12 hours, gone home for 6, and was now back for another 12. On Christmas Day.
She said: “I asked her how she does it. She laughed and said, ‘You don’t do it. You survive it.’ She told me she hasn’t had a normal sleep schedule in four years.”
Me: “Four years?”
She continued: “Yeah. She said her body doesn’t know what time zone it’s in anymore. She eats dinner at 2am. Sees her kids for maybe an hour a day. And the hospital just told them they’re short-staffed again, so more overtime is coming.”
The room was silent.
Someone asked, “How many people work like that?”
And honestly, I didn’t know. So we looked it up. Right there in the meeting.
What We Found
Turns out, a lot more than I thought.
16.8 million Americans work non-traditional shifts. That’s not a small number. That’s 15% of the full-time workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Night shifts. Evening shifts. Rotating schedules where you work days one week and nights the next.
And that’s just the permanent shift workers. Gallup found that 29% of all workers had worked at least one shift outside normal hours in the past month.
16.8 million
Americans work nights, evenings, or rotating shifts
But the health numbers—that’s where it got real for us.
Shift workers have a 33% higher rate of workplace injuries. Night shift workers have a 41% higher risk of heart disease. They sleep an average of 5.5 hours a night, compared to 7.2 for day workers. That’s almost two hours less. Every single day.
Someone on the team said, “That’s basically permanent jet lag.”
Exactly.
The Conversation That Changed How I Think
What started as a personal story turned into a two-hour discussion. We pulled up studies. Read statistics out loud. Shared what we knew from customers.
One of our engineers mentioned a manufacturing client we work with. They run three shifts. He said, “I always wondered why their scheduling problems seemed so urgent. Now I get it. When you’re running on five hours of sleep, everything is an emergency.”
Our customer success lead talked about a restaurant chain we onboarded last year. “They had 70% turnover. I thought it was pay. But they told us it was the schedule chaos. People would get their shifts two days in advance. You can’t plan a life like that.”
Another team member: “Why don’t people just quit and find day jobs?”
She replied: “Because someone has to work at 3am. Someone has to stock the shelves overnight. Someone has to be in the ER when my uncle needs help. These jobs don’t disappear.”
She was right. The 24-hour economy exists because we need it. Hospitals. Airports. Warehouses. Gas stations. Someone’s always working while the rest of us sleep.
The question isn’t whether shift work should exist. It’s whether we’re treating shift workers like humans.
The Numbers That Hit Us Hardest
Over the next few days, I kept digging. I wanted to understand the full picture. Here’s what I found:
Healthcare is brutal. 83% of healthcare workers work shifts. The 12-hour shifts that hospitals love? They increase medical errors by 28%. And replacing a single nurse—when they burn out and quit—costs the hospital $52,350.
Retail is chaos. 67% of retail workers have unpredictable schedules. 45% of hospitality workers get their schedule less than a week in advance. That’s why the restaurant industry has 75% annual turnover. Three out of four employees leave every year.
Sleep is the real crisis. 62% of shift workers don’t get enough sleep. 37% of night workers admit to falling asleep during their shift at least once a month. Fatigue-related productivity losses cost employers $136 billion a year.
37%
of night shift workers fall asleep during their shift at least monthly
And here’s the one that surprised me most: when you ask shift workers what they want, it’s not more money. 79% say schedule flexibility matters more than a 5% raise. 64% would leave their current job for one with a more predictable schedule.
They just want to know when they’re working. That’s it.
Why This Hit Different
We’re a scheduling company. We’ve always known scheduling matters. But if I’m honest, I thought about it mostly as an efficiency problem. Reduce overtime. Fill shifts faster. Cut down on no-shows.
That meeting changed something for me.
Scheduling isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about whether a nurse gets to see her kids before bedtime. It’s about whether a warehouse worker knows if she can make it to her mom’s birthday dinner. It’s about dignity.
She put it best: “We always say we’re helping businesses manage their workforce. But actually, we’re helping people manage their lives. That’s bigger than I realized.”
She’s right. And I don’t think I fully understood that until December 31st, 2024, sitting in our conference room, listening to her talk about a nurse who hadn’t slept properly in four years.
What We’re Taking Into 2025
I’m not going to pretend we have all the answers. We’re not going to solve shift work overnight. But that conversation clarified something for us as a team.
Every feature we build, every customer we help, every decision we make—there’s a real person on the other end. Someone who might get an extra hour of sleep because their schedule wasn’t a mess. Someone who might make it to their daughter’s school play because they got two weeks notice instead of two days.
That matters.
So here’s what we’re committing to:
We’re publishing what we learn. This article is the first. We’re going to share the research, the statistics, and the stories we hear from customers. Not to sell anything. Just because more people should know.
We’re building for shift workers, not just managers. It’s easy to build tools that help managers schedule efficiently. We want to build tools that give workers more control, more visibility, more say in their own lives.
We’re listening more. That conversation on New Year’s Eve happened because someone spoke up. We want to keep having those conversations. With our team. With our customers. With anyone who works non-traditional hours.
A Final Thought
That nurse in the ER—I keep thinking about her. Twelve-hour shifts. Six hours of sleep. Back for another twelve. On Christmas Day.
She’s one of 16.8 million Americans working while the rest of us sleep, eat, celebrate, complain about traffic. They keep hospitals running. They keep warehouses stocked. They keep the world moving at 3am.
The least we can do is build tools that make their lives a little easier. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what 2025 is going to be about.
And to everyone working a shift tonight—we see you. We’re building for you.
Happy New Year.
— Shay Panuilov, CEO & Founder, Scheduler Systems
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, OSHA, CDC, National Sleep Foundation, American Heart Association, Gallup, and peer-reviewed research. All statistics from 2024 publications.