AbstractIn some industrial or health‐related processes, it makes more practical sense to monitor either an increase only or a decrease only in the quality characteristic of interest. Consequently, in this paper, we propose four one‐sided Shewhart charts supplemented with runs‐rules to monitor the mean of autocorrelated normally distributed samples using a stationary first‐order autoregressive model. To counteract the negative effect of autocorrelation, we implement a sampling strategy which involves sampling of non‐neighboring observations to form rational subgroups. The Markov chain technique is used to derive zero‐state and steady‐state closed‐form expressions of the specific shift performance metric, ie, average run‐length (ARL). Moreover, we compute the expected ARL metric which evaluates each monitoring scheme based on all specified range of possible values of the shift parameter, or more specifically, from a global point of view and thus gives a different perspective from the specific shift ARL metric. We observed that the steady‐state improved w‐of‐w and the improved 2‐of‐(H + 1) schemes yield a better overall performance than their corresponding basic counterparts for all different levels of autocorrelation. A real‐life example is provided to illustrate the implementation of the monitoring schemes proposed here.