Absences from Work

What are Absences from work?

Absences from work occur because of sickness or other unexpected reasons and can affect or even disrupt your business, particularly if you have no policies and systems in place to deal with them.

Why optimize Workforce Scheduling and reduce Absences from Work?

An environment in which absences are reduced and staff can be healthy, happy and working effectively, is possible through an affective workforce scheduling process. For example, employees can create their own work-life balance within a workforce scheduling approach that uses self-scheduling. This has been shown to decrease absenteeism significantly and to increase employee engagement.

How to optimize Workforce Scheduling and reduce Absences from Work?

The first step reducing absenteeism, is to optimize workforce scheduling with a system that uses smart algorithms. A ‘smart algorithm’ is a set of well-defined instructions that finds the best optimum in formal rules combined with restrictions deriving from organizational or personal preferences. In the world of optimization, an algorithm is ‘smart’ when its mathematical solution is also balanced out with in-depth knowledge about the client’s business needs and, often, insights from applied sciences. An algorithm functions along a set of well-defined rules, while additional insights that refine it into a ‘smart’ algorithm are referred to as ‘restrictions’.

Formal rules, for example, can be found in:

• Labor laws
• Collective Labor Agreements (CLA's)
• Contracts, like service level agreements (SLA's)

Restrictions come from the organizational needs for which the smart algorithm is created. These can include:

• Specific business KPIs
• Situational or local requirements
• Tasks that require specific expertise
• Employee preferences

Smart algorithms uploaded with a full set of rules and restrictions allow an organization’s scheduling system to prevent, detect and report ‘violations’, such as overtime or a mismatch between expertise and the specific job that has to be done. These can be resolved, either by a manager, a planner or, in a self-scheduling environment, employees themselves.

An organization itself and the workforce scheduling system it has in place, both influence the choices concerning which form of autonomous planning to use and the level of employee participation.

Different forms of autonomous planning include:

• Self-scheduling: Employees design their own schedules from start to finish
• Shift swapping: Employees are enabled to swap shifts
• Shift bidding: Employees indicate their preferred shifts and the planner decides
• Shift picking: Employees choose and are assigned their preferred shifts directly.

What are the results of optimizing Workforce Scheduling and reducing Absences from work?

Optimizing workforce scheduling by introducing self-scheduling and reducing absences from work leads to:

• Significantly reduced time spent on scheduling
• Eliminated time spend on communication to schedule
• Increased employee engagement, motivation and satisfaction
• Reduced extended shifts and overtime
• Improved productivity

Why contact ORTEC to optimize Workforce Scheduling and reduce Absences from Work?

ORTEC has extensive knowledge and experience in optimizing workforce scheduling within a range of different industries, each with its own specific needs but all sharing a high level of complexity. ORTEC works with clients around the world to introduce autonomous planning or self-scheduling, shift bidding, shift picking and shift swapping into their scheduling processes.