The lifecycle

3. The lifecycle: from staffing requirement to time off

This chapter describes the full cycle as it looks for planned rotation or an assignment at normal notice, seen from the coordinator's side. Chapter 6 describes the same sequence seen from the employee's side, through the operator's systems. At short notice the same steps apply, but compressed: see chapter 4.

3.1 Planning and the rotation plan

Good communication starts long before mobilisation. Predictability is the single biggest contributor to wellbeing for rotation personnel, because their whole family life is planned around the plan.

Best practice:

• Publish the rotation plan as far ahead as you can, ideally 6 to 12 months. A plan with caveats beats no plan.
• Check whether your agreement sets notice periods for changes, and follow them. The periods vary between agreement areas, and some agreements set no general deadline for changing a planned rotation. If yours does not, set an internal deadline and hold to it. Changes inside the deadline are permitted, but frequent changes close to it wear down trust even when they are formally correct.
• Distinguish clearly between a confirmed plan, a provisional plan and an availability period. The employee should never be in doubt about which status a period has.
• When the plan changes, always explain why. "The client has pushed the start back two weeks" is accepted far better than a silent shifting of dates.

3.2 Nomination and confirmation

When someone is nominated for an assignment, two things have to happen before anything else:

Requirements check. Confirm that the person meets every requirement for the installation and the role: a valid helseattest (offshore medical certificate), valid basic safety and emergency preparedness training, role-specific courses and certificates, any client requirements, and entry requirements for work abroad. Check validity against the whole assignment period, not just the departure date. A certificate that expires on day 8 of a 14-day trip is a problem to catch now.

Active confirmation from the employee. The person has to explicitly confirm that they are taking the assignment, with the date and the installation. A nomination without a confirmation is not a crewed position; it is a hope.

Only once both are in place is the person registered with the client and on the POB, and the registration process with the operator started (see 6.2).

3.3 Pre-mobilisation: the communication timeline

A structured timeline removes both no-shows and unnecessary phone calls. The timeline below applies to assignments at normal notice. Adapt the deadlines to your own operation, but keep the structure. At less than 14 days' notice the steps compress as described in 4.4; none of them is skipped.

On confirmation (typically 2 to 6 weeks ahead): Send the mobilisation letter (see chapter 5). Ask for active confirmation of receipt. At the same time, ask the employee to verify that next-of-kin information and contact details are correct (see chapter 11). Start registration with the operator and ask the employee to complete their part (profile, document upload, e-learning; see 6.2 and 6.3).

14 days ahead: Confirm that all certificates and the helseattest are still valid for the whole period, and that the documents are approved in the operator's system, not only in your own. Book travel and hotel if that has not been done. Clarify special needs (diet, medication that has to be declared, survival suit size for a first-time traveller).

7 days ahead: Send the travel information as one package: tickets, hotel confirmation, reporting time and place at the heliport. Remind them of ID requirements, baggage rules and any pre-check-in in the operator's portal.

72 hours ahead: A short reminder with the three most important points: reporting time, reporting place, what to bring. Ask for confirmation again. An unanswered reminder is followed up by phone within 24 hours.

24 hours ahead: Check the weather forecast and helicopter status. Where a delay looks likely, give notice proactively that the situation is being monitored, even when nothing is settled. "We are watching the weather and will let you know by 18:00" is valuable information.

This timeline suits automation well, but automation never replaces the requirement for active confirmation and manual follow-up of the people who do not reply.

3.4 Mobilisation day

• The coordinator or the duty coordinator should be reachable on a known number from early morning until the personnel are confirmed on board (see chapter 12 on the on-call rota).
• If the helicopter is delayed or cancelled, tell people immediately, including when the new information is only "we do not know more yet, next update at X". Fixed update intervals during a wait reduce frustration dramatically.
• Have a defined no-show routine: who calls, when it escalates, who tells the client, and how the reserve is activated.
• Confirm arrival on board and update the POB. Only then is the mobilisation complete.

3.5 During the stay

Contact during the stay should be light but precise:

• Working hours and rest: The coordinator should keep a running view of whether the oppholdsperiode (continuous stay offshore) and rest periods stay inside regulation and agreement. Where an overrun is planned or looks likely, handle it before it happens, with a documented decision, rather than discovering it afterwards.
• Extension: A request to extend a stay should always go through the coordinator, never be agreed directly between the platform management and the employee alone. An extension is checked against the regulatory limits on oppholdsperiode and follows the process the agreement requires. Agreement areas differ here: several require discussion with the tillitsvalgte (employee representatives) rather than individual consent from the person, so check what applies to you. Whatever the agreement requires, the employee should confirm in writing themselves, with the consequences for compensation and the next period of time off. On service assignments, where the length of the job is set by the operation, the expected duration with an uncertainty range belongs in the mobilisation letter from the start (see 4.4).
• Changes at home: Give the employee one clear channel for raising needs during the stay (illness in the family, a need to travel home early). Such approaches should be answered quickly and with empathy. How a company handles a crisis at home is remembered for a long time.

3.6 Demobilisation

• Confirm the journey home and any ticket changes the day before departure.
• Have a clear routine for submitting hours, expense claims and any deviation reports, with a deadline and a channel (see chapter 14 on pay and trust).
• Confirm the next confirmed rotation or known assignment possibilities in writing at demobilisation, so the employee travels home with full clarity about what lies ahead.

3.7 Time off

• Write down, ideally in the staff handbook, what counts as legitimate contact during time off and what does not.
• Time-critical changes to the next assignment are of course notified, but gather them where you can, so the employee does not get a drip of small messages through the whole period.
• Courses and refresher training that have to fall in time off should be agreed well in advance and compensated in line with the agreement. Never book a course in someone's time off without agreeing it.

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4. When the notice is days, not months: job-driven crewing

For service companies, short notice is not a deviation; it is the operating model. Start-up is set by the client's rig schedule, the progress of ongoing operations, weather windows and equipment readiness. A job can be "likely in week 29" for three weeks, then be confirmed with departure in 36 hours. Or it disappears entirely.

The timeline in 3.3 cannot be run in 36 hours. The answer is not to cut steps but to move them: everything that can be done before the job exists is done continuously, so that the mobilisation itself consists only of what genuinely requires a specific assignment. Good short-notice coordination is 90 per cent readiness and 10 per cent execution.

4.1 Move the work from the assignment phase to the readiness phase

• Certificate status should be green across the whole pool at all times. At short notice there is no time to renew a helseattest or take a refresher course. Renewals are planned continuously from the expiry date, not triggered by the next assignment. A person with an expired certificate is in practice unavailable, and the overview should show them as exactly that.
• Complete personnel profiles, captured once. Travel preferences, nearest airport, survival suit size, ID and passport details, next-of-kin information, emergency contact. None of this should have to be collected on mobilisation day.
• A requirements matrix per client and installation, maintained in advance. Then the requirements check at nomination takes minutes rather than a round of emails to the client.
• Keep personnel "warm" with repeat clients. For clients and installations the company serves regularly, make sure the relevant personnel are already registered in the operator's systems with approved documents and completed operator courses (see chapter 6). Registration with an operator can take days, and is often the real bottleneck at short notice, not the travel.
• Ready-made mobilisation letter templates per client and installation. The fixed details (heliport, baggage rules, client requirements, contact points) are already in place, so a complete letter can be produced in minutes once the date arrives.

4.2 Real-time availability, and agreed standby

Short-notice crewing lives or dies on knowing who can travel, without a round of phone calls:

• Let employees report and maintain their own availability: holidays, course days, other work, "not available before Monday". An availability status the employees own is more accurate than the coordinator's assumptions, and it makes a "no" on the phone the exception rather than the rule.
• Formalise standby. If the business model requires people to be able to travel at under 48 hours' notice, there has to be an agreed arrangement for it: who is on standby when, what response time applies, how it is compensated, and that it is free to decline outside agreed standby. "Everybody is always half on call" without an agreement is the surest route to burnout and resignations in the service sector.
• Rotate the standby load visibly and fairly. People accept short notice when the burden is shared and the rules are known.

4.3 Signal likelihood, not only confirmation

The biggest communication failure in short-notice operations is staying silent until the job is certain. The employee then gets no information for three weeks, followed by a demand to travel out tomorrow. People handle uncertainty well when it is communicated; what they do not handle is being surprised.

Use three explicit statuses, and always be clear about which one applies:

1. Possible: "There is a job with [client] in weeks 29 to 30 that may become relevant for you. No commitment yet, more information when we have it."
2. Intended: "You are our candidate for [assignment] with a likely start around [date]. The client will probably confirm on [weekday]. Tell us now if the period does not suit you."
3. Confirmed: Full nomination with active confirmation and a mobilisation letter, as in 3.2.

An "intended" notice does two jobs: the employee can plan around a likely assignment, and the coordinator catches clashes ("I am at a wedding then") while there is still time to find someone else. Be honest about your hit rate at the same time: only flag what is genuinely likely, or the notices lose their value. An intended notice is also the right moment to start operator registration if the person is not already in the system (see 6.2).

4.4 The compressed mobilisation sequence

When the confirmation arrives at short notice, the timeline from 3.3 collapses into one continuous sequence. No step is removed:

1. Requirements check against the requirements matrix; minutes, because the readiness work in 4.1 is done.
2. Phone the employee for verbal acceptance. At short notice you never start with email.
3. A complete mobilisation letter goes out immediately after the call, with a request for written confirmation. Set an internal standard, for example: letter out within one hour of the client's confirmation.
4. Travel is booked in parallel and sent on as soon as it is ready, with a clear message about what is outstanding and when it will arrive.
5. The confirmation loop is closed. At short notice, an unanswered confirmation is followed up by phone within the hour, not within the day.

Two additions specific to service assignments:

• State the expected duration with its uncertainty, not a falsely precise date. "Estimated 5 to 8 days, depending on the operation" is honest and lets people plan. A homeward date everyone knows is fictional undermines everything else in the letter.
• Set out what happens on postponement or cancellation in the letter itself: how it will be communicated, and what terms apply (see 4.5).

4.5 Postponement and cancellation are the norm, treat them that way

In job-driven operations, jobs are cancelled and moved close to departure. That is outside the coordinator's control, but the communication around it is not:

• Give notice of postponements and cancellations as quickly and as methodically as mobilisations, answering the same four questions as in chapter 10: what, why, what it means for you, what you have to do.
• Have clear and known rules for compensation when a job is cancelled at short notice, in line with the agreement. Someone who has rearranged the family logistics for a job that vanishes without a word and without compensation is soon a former employee.
• On a postponement, give a new status ("back to intended, next update Friday") rather than silence. The person should always know which state the assignment is in.

4.6 Measure the readiness, not only the execution

Alongside the key figures in chapter 18, measure what decides your short-notice capability:

• Time from client confirmation to mobilisation letter sent (measured in minutes and hours)
• Share of requests answered with a qualified, confirmed candidate inside the client's deadline
• Share of the pool that is "green" on certificates and helseattest at any given time
• Share of the pool fully registered with repeat clients and operators
• Accuracy of intended notices (the share that were actually mobilised)

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5. The mobilisation letter: the most important document in the chain

The mobilisation letter is the employee's complete reference for the assignment. The aim is that the person never has to ring and ask about something that should have been in it. A complete mobilisation letter contains:

The assignment

• Installation or rig, and operator or client
• Position or role, and shift pattern
• Assignment period with planned outbound and homeward dates, or an estimated duration with an uncertainty range for operation-driven assignments
• The immediate supervisor on board, where known

Travel and reporting

• Reporting place and time at the heliport (including the requirement to report in good time before departure)
• Helicopter operator and flight information
• Travel route to the heliport with tickets, and hotel where an overnight stay is involved
• Baggage rules: weight limits, prohibited items, rules for lithium batteries and power banks, and medication
• Any pre-check-in the employee has to do in the operator's portal before reporting
• A link to the operator's own travel information page. The details around baggage, medication handling and check-in vary by operator and change over time. Pointing to the operator's authoritative source as well as summarising the essentials keeps the letter templates maintainable and gives the employee the current rules.

Requirements to bring or hold valid

• Valid photo identification
• A valid helseattest for offshore work
• Documentation of safety training and role-specific certificates
• Any client-specific requirements, including operator e-learning courses that have to be completed before departure

Practical

• A contact person at the employer with a telephone number, including the out-of-hours duty number
• What the employee should do in case of illness or another reason for not travelling
• The routine for delay, postponement or cancellation

Terms

• A reference to the applicable pay and compensation terms for the assignment, where relevant

Send the letter as early as you can, require active confirmation, and update it on every change. When something changes, always send the complete updated letter rather than a message about what changed. Then there are never two versions of the truth. At short notice the letter should be producible in minutes from prepared templates and pre-captured data (see 4.1); haste is no excuse for an incomplete letter.