ABSTRACTIn the increasingly competitive services sector, utilization of the labor force can make the difference between profits or losses. Until recently, service operations managers had a limited set of tools, most of them computer‐based, for scheduling labor. This paper offers a manual heuristic for labor scheduling that outperforms traditional algorithmic solution approaches.Specifically, this study examines the problem of scheduling employees in service delivery system subject to demand variability. The manual heuristic proposed asigns full‐time empolyees to weekly work schedules with the objective of minimizing the total number of labor hours scheduled. The performance of the manual heuristic is compared to the classical algorithmic solution and to a lower bound for a variety of demand distributions and system operating conditions. The heuristic is shown to produce a smaller work force than the classical approach in 106 of the 108 demand‐operating condition patterns exa