New Mexico Sheriff: 4-Day Workweek Pilot Program Created Positive Results

Overtime use at the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office has decreased by about 53% over the past six months.

The agency’s vacancy rate is at a startlingly low 3%, down from 24% in August.

Response times are down, while morale is up.

County and sheriff’s office officials say the findings of a six-month pilot project giving patrol deputies four-day workweeks at full-time pay — between Oct. 5 and April 5 — show the schedule change has resulted in several positive outcomes, from recruitment and retention improvements to better law enforcement metrics like self-dispatching to calls and traffic stops.

The agency provided year-over-year data related to staffing and enforcement numbers as well as feedback from deputies who participated in the pilot program, “Work Well, Live Well,” modeled on a schedule implemented by a law enforcement agency in Golden, Colo.

After the promising results, Sheriff Adan Mendoza said in an interview Tuesday he would like to implement the “4/8/40” work schedule — meaning four eight-hour shifts and eight hours of administrative leave per week — across his entire agency.

The sheriff’s office is believed to be the first law enforcement agency New Mexico to try a four-day workweek for officers, who tend to log lots of overtime in Santa Fe and nationwide, in large part because of high job vacancy rates.

The idea, according to a statement from the sheriff’s office, is that deputies work 32 hours each week, and they receive eight hours of administrative leave to focus on their “mental and physical well-being” — a perk aimed at keeping positions filled, drawing new recruits and elevating job performance.

Deputies who work more than 32 hours a week are paid at their regular hourly rate until they reach 40 hours of actual work time, after which they can make overtime pay.

“The little bit of sacrifice in the schedule is that the first eight hours is straight time instead of time and a half,” Mendoza said. Deputies have used the extra free time to go to the gym, jog, spend time with their families, listen to podcasts, read and do other activities that contribute to their health, he added.

The new schedule has succeeded in attracting officers to the agency, bringing the vacancy rate down well below that of other departments, according to county officials.

While six patrol deputies chose to maintain their regular schedule, 44 opted into the pilot program.

Paid time off for wellness is an employment incentive the city of Santa Fe also has explored. Several hundred city workers have participated in a two-year pilot program that offers one day of wellness leave each year and up to two hours a week for fitness and other self-care activities. A recently released study on the program showed signs of success.

Mendoza hopes to expand the sheriff’s office program to more deputies, including those in the Criminal Investigations Division and Court Services Divisions.

“I’m working with the [County] Manager’s Office to look at those divisions and see if we can expect it for the whole department,” Mendoza said. “You know, all sworn personnel are experiencing the same stresses and the same health issues, so we’d like to expand it to the whole department. That’s the goal.”

Data provided by the sheriff’s office shows the number of times deputies self-dispatched — in which they responded to a call by their own initiative — more than doubled for several months under the pilot, with deputies who opted into the new schedule self-dispatching to about 69% more calls.

The opt-in group of deputies also led deputies in previous years in their number of traffic stops.

Overall, response times for calls were lower during the six-month pilot period.

Mendoza said the average response time for high-priority calls — a key metric for law enforcement agencies when it comes to measuring efficiency of service — had risen several months into the pilot program. However, he said it dropped below that of previous years in the last few months after the agency put an increased focus on lowering response times.

A variety of factors can affect response times, he noted, including the times and locations of calls and weather.

“One of the things that I really have enjoyed about this pilot program is everybody working towards a common goal — and that was to see productivity rise — to hopefully extend this program,” Mendoza said.

He added, “I personally was happy and grateful that just to see everybody working towards a common goal, and I think employee satisfaction and morale has gone up throughout the department.”

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