Tag Archives: Workforce

Self Scheduling

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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

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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

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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.

 

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.

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…

 

Other Alternatives

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The previous sections explain two types of workload: time-dependant and time-independent. I’ve taken the liberty to explain them this way so that it is easier to categorize and relate to how most people see it. Some folks even distinguish the vocabulary by calling them jobs (time dependant) and tasks (time independent).

 

But when you think about it, there are only two variable at play here: the quantity of work and the timeframe to accomplish it.  Everything can fall in line with just these two variables. For example, if we have time independent workload that is on a one-hour resolution, we could say that a workload of 8 people at 9am is the equivalent of saying there is 8 hours of work to be accomplished between 9am and 10am.

 

The same goes for time independent work where a six-hour task needs to be done on Monday is the equivalent of 6 hours of work to be accomplished between 9am and 9pm.

 

Some industries do express their workload this way and measure accordingly. Other industries simply create a schedule based on their resources. For example, casinos have opening and closing times for different tables which basically represent shift work, but for a table. The schedule then becomes an exercise of matching two schedules: one representing the workload and the input to the employee’s schedule.

 

Mining and oil industries need to fly their employees to the mine or the platform. The employees work there for a week or a month before coming back. But when they are there, they also have a schedule. In these cases, you have a schedule of presence and a schedule of work when present. It’s kind of a schedule within a schedule. In these cases, although they are measured differently, there is only one workload that drives both schedules.

 

There are other ways of expressing the workload. The planner must simply pick the workload that can be easily measured against an employee’s schedule. The point of expressing a workload is to be able to assign it to employees and measure accurately at all times.

The Wiggle Room

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As any planner knows, it is difficult to foresee the events that become obstacles to the future you planned. The workload represents the starting point and is what drives everything else in the scheduling process. Therefore, its accuracy is as important as its definition.

 

This workload changes as it proximity approaches. A planner can review the workload for tomorrow with much more accuracy than the workload in a month from now. The planner will have access to much more accurate weather, trends of the week, latest events, etc that will influence both the number and the shape of the workload.

 

When the schedule is built, it is usually done with a workload that has far proximity and therefore less accuracy. But once the schedule is done and communicated to employees, it is very difficult to make dramatic changes to that schedule (that schedule represents the employee’s life, remember?).

 

Since a planner knows they can’t change the schedule and know that the workload is approximate, it is good practice to leave some wiggle room for the schedule to be adapted later. Of all the formulas that were discussed earlier (rounding the employees, measuring in seconds vs. minutes, etc), one of these steps can be padded or rounded up to give breathing room to both the planner and the employees.

 

Now some of you may say that rounding up is counter-productive and goes against business sense to stay competitive and find ways to cut costs. My argument against that is that if you only focus on the aspect of employee productivity down to the second, you may end up with turnover ratios that are high, absenteeism that is high, overtime costs that are high, etc. The human factor will take over and all the standard HR ratios will start creeping up.

 

Obviously, you can’t round too high since you won’t be competitive at all and not produce any profit as an organization. There is a balance, but with my experience, a balance just a tad in favor of rounding up will prevent hidden issues to creep up later down the road.

 

The important thing in adding wiggle room is to round up ONCE only. If you pad the number of seconds up, then the number of employees up, then the hours up, etc, you will end up with a much higher workload than you normally have.

 

The trick is to be as accurate as you can be (depending on your business) and then identify ONE of your math steps to be rounded up. Ideally, you pick at either end of the spectrum (either on the initial task measure or at the end when you say how many hours or employees are required).

Open and Close Times

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No matter your business, someone will be coming in to turn the lights on. That preparation time has to be added to the workload through one of the workload types. Some manufacturing processes, especially in the food industry, need to stagger shift start times so that the first employee to walk in will turn on the lines and let them heat up for production before everyone else walks in to actually work on these lines.

 

These times are important to add to the workload. They represent the preparation of a work area so that it is ready to receive an employee and have that employee productive.

 

The same applies to closing times. The equipment needs to be cleaned, the lines need to be turned off in a certain order, etc. This is also time that is necessary to add to the workload.

 

In some cases, the employee doing the work is the one preparing his environment. In our grocery store, the cashier is the person that will open the register and count the cash at the end once they close it. It is not necessarily related to the open/close times of the store since a register can close in the middle of the day. In these cases, depending on the time required for these tasks, the workload needs to be changed so that every time one less cashier is required for example, 15 minutes area added at the end of that curve. So if 3 registers are required until 8pm and then only 2 are required, the workload needs to reflect that 3 registers are required until 8:15pm.

 

Note: the open/close times for the workload are not the same as setup time for the employees. For example, if the employees need to change before being allowed in the production area and you give them 5 minutes to do so, this 5 minutes is not required for the workload to be started. It is required for the employee to be ready to work and should be added to the employee’s shift as such, but not to the workload. This time is not part of producing work or getting a machine ready. Chapter 4 will discuss setup times more in depth.

Mixed Workloads

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The mixed workloads that have both Time Dependant and Time Independent tasks should be handled as Time-Dependant workload first. A planner needs to establish that demand and then add the time-independent hours to the curve. If we take the Butcher workload as an example, The volume of customers may require two butchers at some points in time but may even dictate that no butcher is required. Since you know you need a butcher at all times during the opening hours, you can measure the ‘free’ hours you have from the periods when no butcher would be required and compare that to the sum of hours required for the time-independent tasks. If you have enough room, then you don’t need to add hours. If you don’t have enough of these free hours, you have two choices as a planner:

 

The first choice is to dictate when these tasks could be done by adding hours to the valleys in the daily curve. Therefore, you keep your workload simple, easy to measure, and you make sure you have enough hours in the day to cover all the required work. The down side of this approach is that the representation of the workload is now twisted since the planner will measure the schedule against what seems to be a time-dependant workload only. So if an employee has to go home early or comes in late, that planner may take decisions based on a workload that does not represent reality.

 

The other choice is to have two separate workloads, one for the time dependant butcher and one for the time independent. This would represent more accurately the real workload when the schedule is measured. In counterpart, this complicates the scheduling process since the planner will now have to keep track of two distinct workloads and also be very precise on what is assigned to which employee and when. It will no longer be a simple one to one relationship between what the employee is scheduled on and what the workload requires.

 

Both approaches have their ups and downs. In my experience, your selection of one method or the other will depend on the size of the business (as explained earlier, the bigger the business, the more detailed it will be), the capacity of the planners, the tools available to the planners, and the capacity for the employees to understand the schedule and its details.