MANAGING EMPLOYEE NOT DEPLOYABLE DAYS

How often do your managers find themselves shutting down positions, scaling back services, or scheduling overtime work to fill positions left open because employees assigned to perform work are not deployable? Since your workforce may not be deployable 10% or more of their scheduled work hours each year, covering those hours is more often than not very challenging.

Complicating the challenge is the many reasons that an employee is not deployable. More complexity occurs when employees are not deployable but are at work. The reasons why employees are not deployable usually fall in one or more of the following categories:

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

Management systems to manage employee not deployable days should be designed to handle each of these types of occurrences with the goal being that minimum attention from shift managers is required. The best systems take advantage of all available resources to provide coverage at the lowest possible cost.

Covering Not Deployable Occurrences

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

  1. Use a shift schedule system that has management strategies included in the design of the system.
  2. Develop and implement strategies that maximize employee time off especially during windows during the year that employees consider time off 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 seasons. From a financial perspective, there are many situations where this is the best way to cover vacation time.
  4. Staff your operation above the minimum requirements. When absences occur openings are automatically filled with the extra personnel on-shift. The biggest disadvantage with this system is that these extra personnel may be idle during seasons when absenteeism is low. Overall, this is often the most expensive source for vacancy coverage.
  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. In these organizations, overtime is a scarce resource that can be easily abused – resulting in fatigued employees, lower productivity, and increased costs.
  6. Cross-train personnel between work areas so that personnel from one department can be used in other departments if there are a crisis. This is good business practice as long as the cost for cross training is not excessive. However, it often does not provide relief during peak vacation seasons or peak production periods when resources in all departments are scarce.
  7. Use temporary personnel. In companies that have some positions requiring little training to perform, this can be the least expensive source of absence coverage. This works best when full-time employees cover all full-time positions. Some of the full-time employees must have the ability to “step-up” to the next job if needed.

When an absence occurs, it is covered by a trained person in the next lower position – creating a daisy chain of step-ups until the actual vacancy is filled at the lowest skill level position. A temporary employee can then cover the vacancy.

  1. Re-schedule work to be performed when resources are available. This strategy usually requires the operation to carry additional product inventory to smooth variations in production capacity and product demand. Another alternative is to use previously unscheduled production time such as weekend time or planned maintenance time. This is very common in manufacturing operations that run as many lines as they have staffing to cover each day. The dangers of using maintenance time for production time are obvious. Operating additional days usually increases overhead costs.
  2. 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.

State-Of-The-Art Absence Management Systems

The best absence management systems use a combination of a good shift schedule, incentives, overtime, cross-training, temporary personnel, and predetermined limits to manage absences. These systems use well-defined procedures that everyone is familiar with to address each type of absence.

We can help you implement a state-of-the-art absence management system. Call us today for a free consultation.