Thank you for joining me for another session of IndeavorTalks. This is episode three in our series on employee flexibility. We will discuss scheduling preferences in detail because granting employees agency is a great way to promote flexibility in the workflow.
I highly recommend you watch the last episode, but if you haven’t, here’s a quick recap of what we talked about in episode two. We spoke about the first category of employee flexibility, which is transparency and accessibility. One of the key points in that discussion was the need to gather employee scheduling preferences in an easy and systematic way to avoid the administrative burden that collecting and using this data can add to the scheduling process.
Today, I want to build on the last episode and talk more about why it’s important and how these preferences can and should be used to promote flexibility while still filling labor standards efficiently. It may be easy to assume that everybody has the same motivations, but that those motivations have little nuance.
• The first shift is always superior to the second shift.
• Job A is less physically demanding, so everybody prefers to do that versus job B, which requires employees to be on their feet all day.
These statements may be generally true in some circumstances and for some people. They’re certainly not universal. An employee might prefer the less physically demanding job at the end of the week when working a double shift or when they’re physically tired. But that same employee might prefer the stimulation of a more physically demanding job at other times.
Some employees like to always work the same start time every day because 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. fits their routine. Or they like working overnight because it works well for their family. Others may like an early or late start time on most days, but on Thursdays, their partner has a late meeting and it falls on them to pick up the kids so they can save a little extra money by having an earlier start time and getting out of work a little bit early that day.
Sometimes employee motivations are a bit more ethereal, and while they might like working in the processing department, they may like working the first shift. However that employee may not see eye to eye with the Wednesday supervisor on the first shift in the processing department. The point is that if your labor demands or employee availability are all variable, how often are they not?
Adjustments to schedules will need to happen, and if you are able to collect any level of nuance to an employee’s preferences, it makes sense to consider these preferences when creating a schedule. With modern automated scheduling software and smart logical processes to allocate labor efficiently with these processes in mind, there is an opportunity to optimize the utility that employees get out of a schedule with vastly more flexibility.
Scheduling automation can consider an employee’s skills and qualifications, along with scheduling rules around things like maximum shift lengths or minimum rest between shifts, and accommodate employee preferences while preventing overstaffing and distributing labor across your demands. If there are gaps in staffing, these gaps are distributed in order to make filling them with part-time, temporary, agency, or casual employees easier.
If you need to rely on overtime, it can allow for more of that overtime to be voluntary. Reducing forced overtime, which is a morale killer that everybody hates. There are many different types of preferences we can consider. So here are just a few examples. Ranking the start and end times within a shift or the preferred order of the jobs and employees qualified to work.
Maybe listing which jobs an employee would be willing to work for overtime, which may be different than what they care about for straight time. If you run continuous operations and have different rotations for days off, employees may have different preferences for which days they like to work. And those preferences might change from week to week.
There are also different timescales that matter for what employees care about. Many workplaces have a bidding process that allows employees to periodically pick what job or shift or department they work in on either a regular cadence Or as openings come up, this is great in that it does give employees some agency in their work life.
But what if an employee may bid to a shift, but there was some flexibility in the start times within that shift instead of each start time being its own bid? Or if a job bid, instead of being to an individual job, was actually to a set of jobs, which would be distributed based on employee preferences within that set.
For shorter timelines, employee preferences can be addressed with volunteering. This can be the standard practice of volunteering for overtime in a defined shift or even defining a specific opening. This can be expanded to allow for scheduling of casual, part-time employees in order to fill gaps, or beyond that, to even allow full-time employees to say which individual shifts they want to work across the week.
Job preferences can then be used to try to give employees what they want within that availability, as long as employees understand that they won’t always get what they want because the first priority is to keep operations going and running efficiently. The added flexibility of adding this input, though, increases the employee’s agency in that process. When employees don’t get the schedule they hope for, enabling employees to swap shifts or jobs with co-workers, or even use a last-minute vacation day, if another employee is willing to pick up their shift. That can provide employees with an added level of control.
As we discussed in an earlier episode, there is an added challenge and complexity of using these preference tools to increase flexibility, but this added challenge can easily be handled with an automated scheduling system. There is, however, another barrier to turning employee preferences into efficient schedules, and that is the reality that employee preferences are not going to be evenly distributed across all functions, and department shifts, particularly in a way that considers employee skills and scheduling. If there is a conflict, and many employees want the same scarce assignments, and it’s possible to fill staffing demands in many ways, what is the best way to resolve that conflict?
See, this is the beautiful part of employee flexibility scheduling processes. It can be designed in a way that meets several different business objectives based on your priorities. When you come here, you may care most about reducing absenteeism, proving productivity, or instituting fairness in distributing scheduling utility.
Any of these objectives can be enabled with smart design and the use of data gathered by your scheduling system or other related systems that can integrate with that scheduling system, to dynamically address your scheduling and business needs. We’re going to be talking more about gathering and using this data to meet business objectives in a later session of this series.
When employees get flexibility afforded them by having agency in their scheduling process. They’re going to be more engaged in that process, have a higher morale, be more productive, call off work less, and be less likely to leave for another work opportunity. This can lead to a reduction of marginal labor costs because there will be less need to overstaff, leverage overtime, or use third-party labor to fill the gaps.
Thank you for joining me today to talk about employee preferences as they relate to employee flexibility. In your next session in this series, I’m going to focus on overtime management, taking the form of reduced overtime spend and shifting away from forced overtime, which is one of the least flexible scheduling options from an employee’s perspective, as it completely removes agency. Until then, have a nice day.
