Category Archives: 3-Understand the workforce

Leaving

· · Leave a comment

Unhappy employees (or the idiots you let go) will eventually leave the company. These employees leave with their experience and knowledge and unfortunately can’t leave it for the next hire who will replace them.

 

The first bad news when an employee leaves is the fact that you will have to retrain a new employee and that new employee will make the same mistakes the previous one did in order to learn the job.

 

Turnover rates are usually a good indicator of employee satisfaction. The usual way of counting the turnover rate is to count the number of departures in a year divided by the number of positions. So if you have 15 positions and you had three departures in the year, the turnover rate is 20%.

 

Although not widely used, you can also count what I call the loyalty rate. Because the turnover rate counts the number of departures, it can get biased in the sense that it may be the same position that is always being abandoned. You could have a turnover count of three departures but always for the same position. The other 14 positions are held by the same employees. In this case, you divide the number of positions where no one left the company on the total number of positions (14 divided by 15) which gives you 93.3%. So although you have a terrible turnover rate of 20% and would see a huge cost to that, you can down play that rate with the loyalty one that is telling you that you are able to keep 93% of your experience from year to year.

 

This is just to show that ratios alone don’t tell the whole story. With the above example, you may elect to look at the definition of this position and determine that it has to be split or redefined.

 

With any departure comes opportunity. You can redefine the position and ask yourself some basic questions. The first question to ask yourself when an employee leaves is: do I need to replace that employee? If yes, do I need the same position with the same constraints or do I turn this position of full-time into two part-time? Should I change the activities that this position covers? Should I change the pay scale and change the required skill level?

 

Many questions to answer and some of them have a direct impact on the schedule and its balance. Planners get to know their employees and know what they like and don’t like. One new employee will change that balance and the planner will have to learn to balance that employee’s requests with the rest of the group. Dynamics around schedules are delicate (see above on the idiot virus) and planners need support when employee changes occur.

 

Employees leaving may not mean leaving the company. They could simply apply on another position in the company. If the employee simply swaps departments but keeps the same job and job conditions, you may elect to meet the employee to understand the reasoning behind the move. It may be because of other team members or management clashes, but it may also be due to scheduling issues.

 

Some planners, although they all try to remain impartial, make friends in the teams they schedule and will favor some employees over others (sometimes consciously, other times not). These favors are always interpreted as injustices from other employees and these injustices, even though they only happen once, remain burned in their brains and are perceived as common practice.

 

As a planner, it is difficult to remain impartial (especially with the idiot virus running around). That is one more reason to make sure your rules are stated clearly and shared with the team (see chapter 4 on fairness constraints).

 

In all cases, employee movement although constant, cause stirring and difficult scheduling situations. New employees will produce lower quality results on top of being less productive. It’s important to make sure you schedule new employees with experienced ones and not put all the new ones together on the same shift constantly.

 

 

 

 

 

Self Scheduling

· · Leave a comment

More and more, planners are letting go of the schedule creation process and leaving it up directly to employees to schedule themselves. The planner will establish the required workload and let the employees sign-up for different shifts.

 

Of course, this mode of operation requires strict rules and strict practice guidelines. You need to determine in which order employees will select. You also need to decide if you will let the employees schedule the whole schedule or just part of it.

 

If you have shifts that your current staff does not like to work (like night shifts or weekend shifts), you may elect to schedule these yourself and then let the employees complete the schedule without changing what you have already planned.

 

There are many different aspects of self-scheduling that will be discussed in later entries. But what you need to know here is that it is a good way to retain your staff by empowering them with some sort of control.

 

 

Share Information

· · Leave a comment

Most human beings want to make sure things work well and that all is fair for everyone (I say most because there are always the egoist, the bad, and the idiot). In any case, the best way to get the employees on your side and have them make reasonable requests is to share as much information as possible.

 

Since you are establishing your schedule against a defined workload, you need to share that workload with the employees. If they see how many people are required each day, they are less likely to complain because they’ll know why they are scheduled at that time or on that day. They will see their contribution to the workload you measure as a planner.

 

If you have established fair rules like counting Sundays worked so that everyone works the same number of Sundays, make that number public with the schedule. People will see when they are scheduled for a Sunday that it is actually their turn and that everyone else has more Sundays worked.

 

This also has the effect of balancing dynamics. Peer pressure amongst the group will establish a sense of justice and fairness since everything is public. If someone calls sick on Sundays all the time when their turn comes, there will be a low number of Sundays worked that will be next to their name. That person has exposed themselves to comments from the others on the team. Obviously, this is a double-edged sword. The details on how you count these Sundays will either improve that sense of justice or make it worse. If you decide to count only the worked Sundays, then someone going on vacation will be penalized negatively. Also, if someone decides to use all their vacation so they don’t work on Sundays, so be it. But that fairness number then needs to include paid vacation (but not sick calls) for example.

 

So the numbers you decide to make public need to be there to help communicate your decisions as a planner. The goal is to inform the employees on what you do and how you do it. It reduces the sense of injustice some may feel, it will definitely reduce the questions the planner gets every time a schedule is posted, and it also empowers employees with the scheduling problem. If they can see another solution, they may bring it to you.

 

With this information, employees will make shift swaps on their own. You need to make sure, as a planner, that you display the required skill set you measure when you schedule so that employees can determine if that trade is good or not.

 

Set Expectations

· · Leave a comment

Everything in life is relevant. Let’s look at two employees who were offered the same job in a different perspective: Employee A is told: « The job is full-time at 40 hours a week and can sometimes be lower than 40. When this happens, the benefits will be proportionately reduced. It doesn‘t happen too often. »

Employee B is told: « The job is part-time at 24 hours a week and can sometimes get to be as high as 40 hours. When this happens, the benefits will be proportionately increased. It could happen on a regular basis ».

 

Now, what happens when the planner schedules both employees for 32 hours? Employee A gets the same thing as employee B yet employee B has more satisfaction. Relatively speaking, employee B has more hours than what was offered. Employee A has the perception that the hours were cut this week and therefore does not have the same level of satisfaction.

 

Perception is everything. Try to explain how schedules are managed as close to the facts as possible. The more accurate the information is, the better the satisfaction level. If you oversell the information, employees will see reality as a downturn. Yet if you undersell it too much, employees will have a hard time believing you later on and you get a credibility issue. The closer you are to reality, the better.

 

You can also regularly survey your employees on their schedules and their perception. The more opinions you receive, the better you are off. It gives you a pulse on what the field perceives. It’s like democracy where voters are asked their opinion every x number of years. But once their opinion has been voiced, there is a dictatorship that gets installed where someone will make decisions. A business is no different where you ask opinions in a democratic way but dictate the final decision.  Surveys are good ways to ensure your decisions have the effect you are looking for.

 

One thing to be careful about surveys is to make sure you form the questions simply and clearly. Sometimes, you can ask questions in a way that would twist reality. For example, if I ask « Do you like vanilla ice cream, yes or no? » rather than asking « what is your favorite ice cream flavor? », I get really very different information. From the first question, I can only say how many people don’t like vanilla. I can’t say how many people have vanilla as a favorite. So be careful in how you form your questions in order not to get the results you want to look good, but to get the information you need to get better.

 

The Idiot Virus

· · Leave a comment

My father-in-law had a very basic observation: there are 10% of idiots on Earth. Back then, before he passed away, I was young and never really paid attention to it. But over the years, I came to the same conclusion as him with all sorts of observations. I’ve even come to refine the concept a bit.

 

Many studies have been done to determine the most optimal size of a team. You’ll get different answers depending on the study and the context it was done in, but in the end, an optimal team size is anywhere between 5 and 8. If you push it a bit, you could go to 9 people on a team. But when you get to 10, that team starts degrading. Why? It’s because you now have one idiot on that team. The idiot is not necessarily the same person all the time. You may have 9 people reporting to you and you need to hire a tenth one. You hire a great superstar. All of the sudden, that new person is very good relatively to the others you had on your team and therefore changes the delicate dynamic balance of that team. That change of balance will cause one member to become mediocre or to start saying and doing stupid stuff; it may even be the person that you considered the best before.

 

It actually happens to anyone temporarily. In a big meeting (with at least 10 people of course), you may raise your hand and say something stupid, act funny, or any other odd thing that people will notice and judge you on. You just caught the idiot virus for that meeting. Now you need to be careful and you need to get rid of it somehow by doing something brilliant so that someone else then gets the idiot tag.

 

Another way I see it is to never make teams bigger than 9. If your team needs to be bigger, start a second team. And if you get to 9 teams, don’t make a tenth team. Because then the rule applies, but to the team. You will have an idiot team. Ask any business, there is always a problem child that has low productivity, much lower than the others. It could be a person or a whole manufacturing plant, if you get to 10, one of them gets the idiot virus[1].

 

Now what does this have to do with retaining employees and schedules? You are scheduling PEOPLE; big teams of people. If you have 20 people to schedule, 2 of them will always be late with their requests, will never be happy with their schedule, will whine all the time about it, won’t want to work with such and such, etc.

 

If you expect that all your staff will be nice and on time, your scheduling process will be a nightmare. If you are prepared and accept the fact that a virus is running around and that every time you do a schedule, 10% of your staff will have that virus, your job will be much easier. Here are some steps you can take to prevent the idiots from ruining your existence:

  1. Set the rules clearly: if the world did not have idiots, there would not be any need for laws and regulations. Everyone would be good and would behave for their own good while respecting the good of others. Well since that’s not reality, rules need to be made clear and need to be applied. The application of the rule is what makes it valid; not only its communication. Before setting up a rule, try to test it out. Put yourself in the idiot’s shoes and see if there is any way you could go around the rule. Then put yourself in a good employee’s shoes and see if this rule would create frustration for that employee. It’s great to put rules together for the idiots, but they can’t run the shop. Employees will see injustice in new rules that are made just because an idiot did something stupid once. There is a fine line between setting up a rule and managing a bad employee. Be careful not to manage a bad employee through the rules. That will cause the perception of injustice across the other employees. None of the others are idiots and all will see directly through your game. That is bad for the management’s credibility.
  2. Apply your rules at all times: If your rules are fair, make sure you apply them all the time. It is important to remain impartial and not forgo a rule for a specific employee because that person is so good you would do anything for them. This creates the other end of the spectrum where some employees become prima donnas and yet again create a perception of injustice.
  3. Send personalized reminders: you know who your idiot staff is. Send them a personal email or note 3 or 4 days ahead of your deadline with a message just for them, not to all. When a message is personalized, folks are more likely to respond to it. If a message is not personalized, only the responsible people will respond to it (responsible is from response-able or able to respond; therefore the idiots won‘t respond)
  4. Write down the requests: when an employee comes up and asks for something, ask for the form before you answer: ‘sorry you’ve past the deadline’. Make sure you keep that form. Sometimes, people abuse and will call in sick for a day off that was refused or a shift they couldn’t swap with someone else. If you have everything written down, then you have information to manage (not punish) the employee.

[1] Of course, there may be only you and someone else and that person is already an idiot. If that happens to you, you are very unlucky and you can then hire a lot more people before you hit another idiot (unless you are just bad at hiring). Statistics do not protect you from hitting an idiot right away, but the laws of averaging will get you to 10%.

Demographics

· · Leave a comment

The area where your store or plant is has a direct impact on your schedule. If you are in a new area where new housing is built, you are more likely to have young families looking for full-time jobs. If you are in a sunny area with lots of recreational activities (like Florida), you’ll be surrounded with retired folks looking for a part-time job.

 

You need to know what’s closest to your place of operations in order to determine the best positions that will help you in your business and yet fit folks that are around you. The schedule will be a center piece to that profile since the schedule runs the employee’s life. If you are surrounded by students, you may elect to reduce the number of full-time employees and increase the number of part-time employees.

 

There is no math or science that will help you determine the best profile. Simple tricks by just describing the ideal employee for you and then describing the typical person you would expect to cross in the neighborhood will help you identify the discrepancies you may have and then choose the profile a little better. When you do this exercise, you list things like age group or generation, education level, and other relevant factual information. Things NOT to list are race, sex, or anything that may be considered as discriminatory. These identifications usually lead to over-generalization and will muddy your facts.

 

One thing for sure is that if you ignore your demographics, there will be effects later down the road. For example, if you only hire part-time jobs in a new area where young families are established, you may end up with a high turnover rate since the folks will change jobs as soon as they can get a full time job somewhere else.

 

Workload and Absenteeism

· · Leave a comment

The usual way folks determine the number of employees to hire (or the number of FTEs) is to make the sum of all workloads in hours over one week and divide by the number of hours a full-time person would do. For example, if our store needs a total of 200 hours of clerks per week, this would give us an equivalent of 5 full time employees to cover the work each week. But that’s not counting on absences.

 

Since the employees are human, they will go on vacation, they will be sick, and they’ll want to be with their families on any statutory holiday. So you need to add the absences in order know the right number of FTEs to hire or at least measure against. Typically, you multiply by an absenteeism rate that is usually known. If you don’t have one, you can count how many days off an employee gets over a year and get a ratio. In our example, if we have 2 weeks of vacation, 2 weeks of sick leave, 2 weeks of statutory holidays, you get 6 weeks out of 52 that are not worked by each employee. That equates to roughly 12% which you need to multiply to the 5 FTEs we had earlier. This would mean that we need to hire 5.6 FTEs. So right off the bat, you could say I need 5 full-time employees and 1 part-time at 24 hours a week (0.6 multiplied by 40 hours).

 

But your workload has a certain weekly and daily profile. If you are managing a store, chances are that you will have your load of customers on Friday evenings and weekends. So if most of your workload needs to be performed then, you can’t hire full time folks. A 40-hour employee will need to work at least 4 days a week and therefore will not be in sync with the workload. So it is insufficient to simply determine what to hire based only on the math of a sum of hours. The workload profile has to be taken into account.

 

The ideal way to take all that in is to create a schedule using fictitious names. By completing a schedule, you can measure and analyze the results before even hiring and also compare between different types of positions (part-time vs. full-time, change of minimum rest constraints, etc). So next time a new department opens or a new store is built, have a planner complete a fictitious schedule so that you have a better sense of what will be needed at the hiring level.

Training

· · Leave a comment

A new employee is like a newborn

They need nurturing and confidence building and they proceed with baby steps in their new job. There is always a cost at having a new employee, even for the simplest job. There will be an overlap of work with an experienced employee so that the new employee can get to know their way around, know what to do and how to do it. The more specialized the work is, the longer the training takes.

 

You can also expect a new employee to produce low quality products or services at the beginning. This will also add to your cost of a new employee.

Arriving

· · Leave a comment

Hiring the right employee profile is essential to avoid systemic scheduling problems. The planner has to schedule employees that come with their constraints. These constraints  are established as you hire the employee.

 

The important thing to remember is not to simply look at what exactly a full-time schedule is telling you to hire. There are thousands of different solutions to any scheduling problem and each of them has its ups and downs. The employees will be hired with their constraints and the planner will have to deal with them when the schedule is created each week. So if a planner only has full-time employees and has that store with weekend traffic, there will be bad service on the weekend and great service during weekdays. The planner won’t be able to do anything about it and guess who will be blamed for putting together a bad schedule? The problem started with the hiring…