Category Archives: 3.1-Arriving

Demographics

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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

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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

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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

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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…