Proportional Labor Demand Analyses

IT'S TIME HAS COME!

HATRAK ASSOCIATES

HISTORICAL AND FUTURE STAFFING DEMAND AND SUPPLY ANALYSES

Over the years Hatrak Associates has provided staffing and scheduling software to organizations where workload fluctuates mostly predictably hour by hour over the 168 hours in the week. These organizations use what is referred to as non-proportional staffing and scheduling. Equally staffed fixed shifts are efficient for some organizations but not for others. Some organizations are more fluid in their staffing requirements than others. Police, Fire, EMS call centers, manufacturing and casinos for example need reliable methods to proportionally staff their operations. Proportional staffing and scheduling is more complicated than required for by non-proportional staffing and scheduling!

Hatrak Associates Proportional Staffing and Scheduling

Staffing and then scheduling the right numbers of employees at the right place and at the right time requires complex analyses of a number of Demand variables. Some organizations may require analysis of Demand variables for each individual hour in a day, for each day of the week, seasonally, by work location, by special event or emergency.

It is hardly a secret that scheduling more staff to work than required can be costly. Under-utilized employees not fully occupied or engaged by continuous work assignments leads to inefficiency. Too few staff can result in excessive overtime costs and make it difficult to provide relief staff when scheduled employees’ are not deployable for whatever reason. Absenteeism “spikes” usually occur when understaffing is continuous (constant). However, some overtime is better than paying fringe and other benefits to new hires.

In proportional staffing and shift scheduling the first requirement is to analyze historical staff demand data using a complex set of algorithms to determine, in some cases, hourly staffing demand. The calculated demand is then used to model shift patterns that are both employee-friendly and efficient. Including employees in the shift pattern analysis process helps with employee acceptance.

Hatrak Associates has recently developed a tool (which will eventually be included in their Employee Shift Scheduling Software) that analyzes proportional staffing requirements. The tool analyzes and calculates the efficiency of current and proposed staffing plans and related shift schedules. The analysis includes a Labor Efficiency percentage. This is a percentage of time that the end user has exactly the right amount of personnel. Any percentage less than 100% means that there is possible overstaffing (more payroll costs than would otherwise be required. The algorithms applied use allow staffing (relief) factors that allow for scheduled absences such as vacation, holiday and other scheduled absences relief and also unplanned absences (emergencies, etc)

Periodic reanalysis uses recent historical demand and supply forecasts help the end user to keep the information reliable. Reanalysis formation offers the end user the ability to revise schedules as necessary to maintain the desired Labor Efficiency percentages.

What’s Next

Hatrak Associates is working with a staffing software provider to large and small staffing organizations http://www.tkosystems.com/ to analyze and merge key features from each application into one fully integrated one. Among the functionality being explored for possible merger is employee work preferences submission electronically. This data will map to the scheduling engines. Reports to third party time and attendance systemsand SMS Text Messaging using Microsoft Outlook have been provided by TKO Systems and have been incorporated into the Hatrak Scheduler. Additional funtionality mergers are being evaluated dhmerger is also being explored (among other additional functionality). The goal for this merger of two excellent software applications is to have the most effective staffing and employee shift scheduling solutions available in the marketplace.

Please contact Hatrak Associates (702.869.8900) (info@hatrak.com) to learn more about how you can get these tools or to arrange for our consulting staff do do an analysis for your organization.

News You Can use

The following is a copy of information provided on the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The link to this site follows:

http://www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/ctt/col0400.html

Corrections Telecommunication and TechnologyF. Warren Benton, Ph.D.John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNYReprints from a series published in Corrections Managers' Report.Access the entire collection at the CTT Web Site.
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Internet Tools for Managing Time

Correctional staff and offenders both have strong reasons to be concerned about managing and using time for prisoners because they have too much of it, and for staff because they have too little. This column will focus on Internet and computer resources available to improve how correctional professionals can manage the use of time.

Shift Schedule Management

A core problem for correctional facility managers involves the administration of the work schedule, a process called "roster management." A supervisor must comply with wage and hour laws and labor agreements, track time worked and leave taken, while assuring that workers are efficiently deployed and receive scheduled days off and vacations. All this has to be accomplished while trying to minimize the use of overtime and involuntary double-shifts, and while trying to stay within budget constraints.

Good places to start on the Internet are provided by GoCrawl at http://gocrawl.com/ or HotBot at http://www.hotbot.com/, or Yahoo and http://www.yahoo.com/, if you search on the terms "Personnel and Scheduling." These sites maintain and update a listing of web sites related to roster management. Some of the sites offer free services and software, including the following:

Schedule-Me offers an online calculator for a work schedule. You tell the calculator how many employees you need on each of the 7 days of the week, and it will work out an optimized solution for how many employees can have Saturday and Sunday off, how many can have Sunday and Monday off, and so on. Winmetrics offers a free web-based scheduling service. The hitch is that, if you want more advanced services, you have to pay. However, for a small organization, their free service is worth considering.

Another good general resource is provided by Winfiles. This site is a collection of free and shareware software packages relating to scheduling and calendar management.

Leading commercial programs in this area include "Relief Factor Management," offered by Hatrak Associates at Hatrak Associates. They offer software packages that support the process of designing and administering a work schedule. A competing product is offered by ScheduleSoft, and another competing product is offered by Positive Solutions Incorporated.

Calendars

For many correctional professionals, the challenge of time management is not the work schedule itself, but rather the management of appointments and meetings within the work schedule. Most computers arrive with software packages that include some time management applications. However, for these applications to function in coordination with other colleagues requires a networked application. On the web, a new category of calendaring service has emerged, provided free personal calendaring with the ability to develop and display a group calendar, and the ability to access the calendar from any web browser. Some examples of these free services include:

JointPlanning Netscape Calendar MyEvents PlanetAll When.com

Obviously, for correctional facility managers and planners, JointPlanner would offer the unique advantage of endless puns and word play associated with the name. There are many similar web sites, and a good way to find them is to search on the term "Personal Web-Based Calendars" in Yahoo.

Group Project Applications

For a small group that collaborates on projects, a new category of web services is emerging the virtual office suite. These are web-based services that include standard applications for word processing, database management, and other standard functions, as well as group collaboration packages such as calendars. Several of these products can be evaluated on the web.

WebOS offers the HyperOffice. This product is free, and it includes free file storage space on their site. It permits a team of workers to share drafts of documents, conduct simultaneous and threaded discussions, and jointly schedule their time, meetings, and activities.

A similar product is MyFreeDesk. This product is similar to HyperOffice, but the calendaring application does not seem to be as developed.

NuoMedia offers a similar application suite, with an emphasis on compatibility with handheld personal computer devices such as a PalmPilot. Once again, the service itself is free.

ThinkFree provides a similar service. Their application includes programs that you download to your computer so that you can work offline and then connect when necessary.

These are applications that might be useful for short-term projects when a group of workers are collaborating on a project from separate locations. For example, a team of Deputy Wardens from several prisons might be drafting a revised procedure, or a team of correctional officers might be jointly evaluating a security product.

Coming Soon: Open Calendaring Standards for the Web

Internet planning and policy organizations are working a uniform standards for calendaring applications, with the following general goals. Applications should: inter-operate and schedule with other open standards-based C&S systems allow users to choose a calendaring program regardless of their calendaring server software integrate desktop applications with each other and with handheld or portable devices.

A good source about the evolving standards is a paper titled Overview Of Calendaring And Scheduling Standards. Another more technical article is "How Calendaring and Scheduling Are Joining the Web Revolution. In both cases, the articles discuss how web site and network designers can plan calendaring applications so that calendars can be shared across organizations, and between people using different brands of software.

In most bureaucracies, the principle applies that "work expands to fill the time available." In correctional facilities and programs, work seems to expand regardless of the time available. Fortunately, there are some resources on the Internet that can help correctional managers to make the best use of available time.

When Employees Are Not Deployable

How often do your managers find themselves shutting down positions, reducing services, or scheduling overtime work to fill positions left open because employees assigned to perform work are not deployable?

Since the workforce may not be deployable 10% or more of their scheduled work hours each year, covering those hours can be very challenging. Part of the complexity centers around the many reasons for employee non-deployable. Additional complexity presents itself when an employee is at work but not deployable to a position.

Typically, the reasons why employees are not deployable fall in one or more of the following categories:

1. Predictable occurrences
2. Not Predictable occurrences
3. Scheduled (planned) occurrences
4. Not Scheduled (not planned) occurrences
5. Controllable occurrences
6. Not Controllable occurrences
7. Administrative occurrences
8. Serious Emergency occurrences

Covering Not Deployable Occurrences Organizations need to establish policy that directs the process for providing coverage, including alternatives to overtime, for employees that are not deployable.
Among the options available to shift managers are:

1. Use an automated shift scheduler to manage schedule assignment changes
2. Develop and implement strategies that maximize employee time off especially during that time of year employees consider prime time (summer months, breaks from school, holidays, special events like hunting season, etc)
3. Provide incentives to the workforce to use their vacation time when the workload is low. For example, give employees an extra day of vacation for every week of vacation taken during low production periods. From a financial perspective, there are many situations where this is a very good way to cover vacation time.
4. Staff your operation with the number of precisely calculated relief positions required to replace employees not deployable.
5. Use overtime to cover vacancies as they occur. While this is a very good use of overtime, it works best in an environment that does not experience large fluctuations in workload from week to week. However, overtime can be abused. When it is the result is fatigued employees, lower productivity, and increased costs.
6. Use temporary personnel.
7. Smooth out the variability of controllable absences using pre-determined limits. This places some of the burden on the workforce to spread out their absences and makes it easier to cover absences with fewer resources.

ALTERNATIVE WORK SCHEDULES

Alternative work schedules are those that include work hours that are normally outside the traditional 8-hour workday or 40-hour workweek. Alternative schedules are often used to allow workers to earn a living while having the flexibility to take care of their children, relatives and other personal situations. Typically alternative schedules are designed to:

1. Tighthten control over mandatory overtime,
2. Offer lexible work days (Flex Time),
3. Compress the workweek,
4. Accomodate shift and days off swapping and
5. Provide opportunities for telecommuting.

The emerging needs of the contemporary workforce and a changing make alternative work schedules important for working families trying to balance their jobs with family responsibilities. Did you know that:

1. More than 1 in 4 working-women work evening or weekend shifts.

2. Nearly 1 in 5 full-time workers work nonstandard hours. More than 1 in 3 are women.

3. Workers subjected to mandatory overtime work have higher rates of alcohol use, stress and absenteeism.

4. Among working parents, 66 percent of fathers and 51 percent of mothers are unhappy with the amount of time they have to spend with their children.

5. Some 46 percent of women married or living with someone work a different schedule than that of their spouse or domestic partner.

Limits on Mandatory Overtime

Being forced to stay at work past the regularly scheduled end time can be very stressful. Many working parents do not have backup arrangements for child care or cannot afford backup care. Provisions in union contracts making overtime voluntary protect employees from this loss of power over their daily schedules.

Flexible Work Hours

Flextime agreements allow employees to vary the start and end of their workday as long as each employee works within a specific range of “core” hours and works the prescribed number of hours each day or each week.

Compressed Workweek

Examples are schedules that allow workers to work four 10-hour days for an extra day off per week or eight 9-hour days and one 8-hour day for an extra day off every two weeks.

Part-time work with Benefits

Part-time work can give working people flexibility to take care of family needs while still receiving an income. It is important to maintain benefits when negotiating for part-time work.

Telecommuting

Telecommuting is working from a site other than the central worksite, usually at home. Unions traditionally have opposed telecommuting because work done at home is difficult to regulate and easily could become “sweatshop” labor. Another union objection is that workers who telecommute can become isolated from one another and are difficult to organize. However, unions have been successful in bargaining for telecommuting provisions that benefit workers.

Job Sharing

Under a job-share agreement, two part-time employees share one full-time job. The two employees divide the full-time salary between them according to hours worked. Benefits and seniority often are prorated according to hours worked, although in some job-share situations both may receive full benefits and/or seniority. Union contracts can protect employees’ right to enter into a job-share arrangement and can establish standards for job shares.

Shift Swap

A shift-swap provision in a union contract allows workers to voluntarily exchange shifts or workdays to accommodate such family needs as attending school events or medical appointments.

Shortened Workweek

Unions have bargained for shorter workweeks for their members with full compensation. Some unions also have used shorter workweek provisions with less compensation as an alternative to layoffs.

Voluntary Reduced Time

Voluntary reduced time allows an employee to reduce the number of hours she or he works in a week in order to have extra time to take care of personal or family needs.

Strategic Sceduling: Seven Steps

A schedule is not a shift length or a day-off pattern!


A schedule is a system for deploying personnel with employee buy-in and specific work / pay / coverage policies. Unlike adding more employees, changing a schedule design can improve the “bottom line” with little extra investment. The major goals for designing a schedule change process includes maximum employee buy and cost reduction.

Scheduling misconceptions abound in the workplace. For example, many managers believe you only have two options if you are running a 24-by-7 operation— eight- or twelve-hour shifts. That is not true. Different industries have developed many innovative ideas. You need to learn how to schedule during high and low workloads without changing total employee headcount, make the night or afternoon shift more attractive than the day shift or build in 20 weeks of vacation inexchange for covering some nights, weekends and holidays—all the result of out-of-the-box thinking.

Out-Of-The-Box Thinking

1. Balance the workload to the workforce: Scheduling employees variably to balance workloads to the workforce and then have the right skills at the right place at the right time at the right cost helps meet the goals listed. Simply put, balance workload to the workforce. This requires a careful analysis of labor demands and labor supply.
2. Documenting the cost difference beteen workload under and over balancing: Too often, labor-scheduling programs do not calculate the cost difference between under matching the workload (overtime) and overmatching the workload (idle labor time). Eliminating overmatching can be the largest labor saving opportunity. It is important to understand this concept. Overtime, when used strategically, is one of management’s least expensive resources. Overtime is the strategic reserve of employees that available to staff sudden increases in workload demand.
   Idle time can occur during inefficient shift changes, through poor maintenance scheduling and with the wrong break and lunch policies. To heighten awareness of this profit drain managers should design idle-labor-time reports along with the traditional overtime reports.
3. Attract and retain employees with schedules that fit their lifestyles: It is possible to attract workers by work schedules that accommodate their personal situation: carpooling, child-care needs, to follow religious traditions, etc. Schedules can be useful recruiting tools. Schedules that offer 200 days off per year and ten percent more pay than the competition can be the difference between hiring an exceptional candidate and losing them to the competition. It is a good idea to explore schedule properties to determine if your current schedule design is not attractive to potential hires.
4. Employee buy-in is crucial toward establishing improved morale and productivity: The best deployment of personnel will not work unless you have employee buy-in. In our experience, employees do not resist change as much as they resist being changed. Employees need to understand the business reasons behind a particular schedule: to improve delivery, to be more competitive, to reduce costs, etc. When informed of the business reasons for a change in schedule, employees are much more willing to go along. Do not assume you know what employees want. Quantify the business reasons for schedule design change. This cost analysis will keep your management team focused, unified and on track if they receive any negative response. Then management and supervisors should communicate these reasons to all personnel. Once the rationale for change is understood, management should offer a series of models that bundle management’s cost-saving needs with anticipated employee needs. Employees can choose from among these models and adjust them into numerous variations until they create their specific, preferred schedules. In this manner, management offers a menu of winners, and employees make their selection from this menu and fine-tune it. The results can be surprising.
5. Work smoothly with unions: It is important to work with unions and managers before, during and after negotiations, within cooperative situations and, the other extreme. The consultative approach for working with a union allows union and management to work together to implement better systems for deploying personnel while improving employee morale. This often means implementing schedules outside the current contract—and requires a letter of agreement—but typically results in the best employee schedules. Given less union cooperation, management may consider implementing improvements inside the current contract, such as taking advantage of management’s current right to implement new schedules and sticking with solutions that better fit the current union contract. In the event the union is unwilling to participate in any cooperative fashion, then you can work with supervisors to provide management with a negotiating manual upon completion of the project. The manual is an itemization of suggested contract language changes with associated cost impact. It contains guidelines for management to use when negotiating cost savings and schedule improvements during future contract negotiations. In almost all cases, you can save significant money by designing schedule changes that work for employees in a union environment. Do not wait until negotiations begin because the schedule may be used as a bargaining chip during negotiations and result in a less satisfactory solution for your business or your employees. Focus on scheduling independent of contract negotiations to get the best schedule for all parties concerned.
6. Improve communication at all levels: Even employees working 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday can be dissatisfied with their schedules. By stating, the company needs clearly after listening carefully to what your workforce prefers, then allowing employees to select from a menu of scheduling options that will meet these needs, both management and employees obtain a better understanding of each other. This is a powerful first step toward building team rapport, improving morale, and increasingproductivity.
7. Work from the bottom up to ensure top performance at all levels: Involve all levels of management and supervisors to institute schedule design change. Do not forget the hourly employees. Do not change schedules needlessly Do not change schedules unless there is significant financial gain for your business. This is especially true in profitable, employee-friendly companies where most employees are accustomed to working 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Do not wait for a crisis to develop. It is more difficult to find the correct solution when operating under extreme pressure. Do not change schedules just because sales are increasing. Make deployment of personnel an ongoing priority. Taking time to make changes pays off. Many managers wait until a crisis erupts to change schedules. For example, a company on a five-day workweek, working excessive weekend overtime and burning out employees, needs to go to seven-day operations tomorrow! You can change schedules during a crisis, but you may end up with only a short - term fix rather than a long-term solution. Probably today, someone in your corporation is making decisions to buy new capital, build a new facility, hire more employees, expand or launch a new product. By rethinking your concept of time and scheduling, you can achieve your goal faster and with less capital outlay. Many managers believe their industry, business or plant is unique, and therefore proven scheduling principles will not work for them. Often management uses this as an excuse to maintain the current system. In addition, managers usually view themselves as scheduling experts—experts at making the current schedule work! Managers often operate with the wrong fundamental scheduling system from the outset, sustaining hidden costs while trying to make the wrong system work.

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