Improve Employee Scheduling for Increased Efficiency

By Matt Stanczak, Consultant

A business issue that crosscuts sector and industry boundaries is how to schedule employees efficiently. Whether you are a manager assigning workers to a road repair crew, assemblers to a manufacturing line, nurses to a hospital ward, or tellers to a bank, managing employees' schedules is critical to a business unit's performance. Today's workforce makes employee scheduling particularly tricky. Depending on the industry, today's workers are increasingly telecommuting, part-timing, or split-shifting. Most managers are happy simply to cover their staffing requirements for each shift. While this may be the most fundamental concern of a line manager, a deeper analysis of this subject can yield more cost-effective scheduling and happier employees.

Objectives
So what else is there to employee scheduling than making sure enough bodies show up to work? As with any other project, begin with the end in mind. Define what is important to your business as it relates to scheduling. Objectives in scheduling projects usually include outcomes like: cutting costs, improving service delivery, increasing production, boosting employee satisfaction.

Requirements
Once you know what you want to achieve, spell out in detail the essential requirements for staffing your business needs. Determine which job skills and expertise are needed for each shift. How many package handlers, drivers, or customer service agents do you need at any given time? Define the relationship between the number of employees and the productivity/service of each shift. How many package handlers and drivers does it take to move 100 packages? What is the package volume for each particular shift? Knowing how your employees affect your business and your bottom line is fundamental to streamlining the scheduling process. 

Constraints
Employees may create the biggest impact on your business's productivity, but employees are not automatons. People have limits - we do not work day and night all week long. Each organization has a unique relationship with its employees. Many people prefer to work 5 days in a row with two consecutive days off. Some companies (trucking, air travel) have legal or insurance restrictions on how many hours an employee may work consecutively. Others have union regulations on employee scheduling. Perhaps most important, employees' preferences need to be taken into consideration. How does a manager comply with all of the scheduling constraints of law, labor unions and personal preferences while still streamlining an efficient workforce? 

There are three ways to solve the employee scheduling problem. The first two are heuristic decision models most commonly used by managers. In the first scenario, a manager devises a scheduling routine that will maximize effectiveness of employees and then scales back the schedule to accommodate for the staff's limitations. The second scenario starts from the other end of the spectrum. Here a manager creates a schedule that meets all of the legal, union, and employee preference criteria and scales it up from there to the most efficient scenario under these conditions.

Either method will bring the manager to an acceptable compromise, but going through the numerous permutations of scheduling scenarios can be mind-boggling and it is nearly impossible to validate that any given schedule is most efficient. 

The third method leverages mathematics and computer technology to decide on a most efficient employee schedule. And don't worry; you don't need to be a mathematician or computer scientist. Think of your employees as factors of production. Each employee has a cost, a level of productivity, and a constraint on when he or she can and cannot work. Think of each work shift as a production function with its own specific requirements that needs employees as its' primary input. Plugging each employee's attributes into this production function to generate a formula, or algorithm. True, this might take some work up front, but once you've settled on an algorithm, managers can change employee attributes on the fly to generate a new schedule.

This method can then be implemented in common spreadsheet and/or database desktop applications that we use every day. Managers can use these applications to validate the efficiency of their schedules and make quick changes as needed. By using a standard function for scheduling employees, managers can also run sensitivity analysis on their schedules. Sensitivity analysis can yield important management information regarding the value added for an additional employee or the cost of an additional union constraint or policy regulation. Sure, this method might take a little more time up front, but the efficiency gained and the information gleaned sure beats writing names on a bulletin board.

Matt Stanczak specializes in business modeling and operations research at The Hill Group. He can be reached at 412-343-9393 or mstanczak@hillgroupinc.com.

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