Category Archives: 1.3-Workforce Scheduling

The Constraints

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By definition, a schedule is laid out through time because of constraints.

 

Most constraints are time-based. Things take time to do and as we all know, time moves on no matter what. Time imposes constraints on the duration work requires, on the moment that work should be done, and finally on the person that will do the work since that person needs to be there and be available in order for the work to be done.

 

There are constraints related to the sequence of the work to be done. Sometimes, things need to be done in a certain order. I mentioned earlier that you can change a plan at any time until it’s actually happened. Well of course, there are different obstacles to changing a plan at the last minute. You can’t open the door on the highway and say « OK, I’m getting off » if you’re still at full speed. You’ll have to announce yourself, so that the steps for you to get off can be taken in the right order (like pulling over…).

 

The most widely known constraints are the ones concerning employees. An employee can only work so many hours in a day or in a week; an employee needs to rest; needs breaks; needs vacation; etc. These constraints are usually explained in an employee handbook or in a union agreement. The problem usually lies in the interpretation of these constraints as they are written with the perspective of human resources. They are not formulated for a planner in charge of applying them.

 

A strategic constraint negotiated at the company level may be difficult to apply at the schedule level. For example, if the company adopts a car pooling policy to reduce tardiness on the job, that’s great at an executive level and seems like it works for all employees. But if you have a department where employees share different shift start times, this policy imposes additional constraints to the planner. That planner now needs to schedule the same shifts to people who live close together so they can take advantage of car pooling as the policy now says. You can imagine the additional headaches for that planner to accommodate everyone while making sure the business operates efficiently. Some of my future entries will detail the constraints planners have to deal with and how to best express them.

 

The Employee

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The single most difficult element of a schedule is the employee.

 

Why? An employee is a human being with his own life, his own goals, and his own projects. That employee has plans for their life and they are changing.

 

For an employee, that schedule you create is their life. That person will have to plan all their personal activities and family obligations around it and that person will try to get the best schedule possible for their own benefit. As people grow older, the benefits will change over the years. What was a good thing for that employee last year (lots of overtime) may not be good this year because that person just entered parenthood. This means that just like the workload changes, your employee preferences will also evolve.

 

Employees want to be treated fairly. Folks who get hired into a job that has varying schedules know what to expect, but they also want to make sure the bad schedules (the weekend night shift for example) doesn’t always fall on them.

 

The schedule is known to be one of the key elements that cause turnover. Anyone in Human Resources would tell you what the cost of turnover is and the importance it has. I won’t make that point here, but I will state that for employees who are scheduled, they will change jobs in a heartbeat for a better schedule simply because it means a better life.

 

You need to establish expectations for the workforce. The clearer they are, the easier your life will be. Don’t put reality on a positive spin or a negative spin: tell the story as clearly as you can to your employees. Otherwise, any gray area will be made up by people. Nature does not like holes and fills them up quickly. Therefore, any hole you leave in your story will be left for people to fill with whatever is good for them (an optimistic person will fill it with happy thoughts and the pessimistic will see a plot to squeeze all the employees and abuse their good will to the bone).

 

Any HR specialist has a whole bunch of directives to give planners and management and what to say and what not to say to employees. In the end, it’s all about humans and future entries will examine more aspects around the employees and the points to look at when scheduling is concerned.

The Workload

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The work to be accomplished represents the cornerstone of scheduling.

 

This work represents the business of any organization and it is crucial to translate that business into actionable work with the appropriate duration.

 

All businesses have a product and/or service that they provide their customers. Products take time to build and services take time to provide. If you are a car manufacturer, you don’t simply schedule people and tell each of them to build a car. That car is broken down into thousands of processes and assembly line tasks. Each task takes a certain amount of time and these tasks are synchronized so that cars get assembled at a certain pace or cadence.

 

The same thing goes for a retail store. A certain amount of customers is expected and people are required to service these customers. There will be a direct relationship between the amount of sales or customers and the employees that will support these sales.

 

The workload is the result of the translation of the business products into manageable, measurable, and assignable activities and tasks. Future text will detail how to translate your business into a workload that makes sense.

 

One thing to remember about the workload is that it evolves and changes just as your business grows. Therefore, even though you did a great job of quantifying your workload last year, you probably need to do it again this year. A mistake done at the quantifying stage of the workload has a domino and an amplifying effect on your operations costs later down the road.

What is workforce scheduling?

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There are many definitions on workforce scheduling

 

These definitions mostly depend on the person looking at it.

 

If you are an employee, the perspective is your own schedule that your employer will give you each week. As an employee, this schedule drives your life and you’ll plan around it or you’ll ask the planner for changes because someone important is getting married and you need to work another day.

 

If you are a planner in charge of doing the schedule, it’s your daily nightmare. This schedule changes all the time because not everybody told you what they wanted at the time you were creating it. Also, that schedule will change as soon as you pass it out. As a planner, this is your never-ending loop of plan-post-redo.

 

If you are the boss or the boss of finance, this schedule is a cost. You will look at measuring the schedule in many ways to reduce that cost so you can increase productivity and profit. You’ll also educate these planners on what KPI (Key Performance Indicators) you look at so they know when to expect praise or blame.

 

As you can see, there could be many perspectives on the schedule and its impact. Simply put, a workforce schedule is the match between people and work. There are three major components to a schedule:

  1.          I.      The workload or work to be done (This point will be seen in detail in a future text)
  2.         II.      The employees or resources that do the work (ditto)
  3.       III.      The constraints that impose the way to schedule (ditto)

 

An important note here: you will notice throughout this series that I categorize and over categorize. This is to keep things within a list of no more than 7 items. If I ever get a list of more than 7 items, this means I need another category. Humans can only remember so many things[1] and therefore by categorizing everything, it‘s easier to remember and it forces you to organize the information.


[1] Psychology experts say that memory is designed to remember 7 things (plus or minus 2) of the same list.