The Three Main Challenges of Workforce Scheduling

First and foremost, workforce scheduling is a technique and skill of how to arrange the employee from the aspect of the skill, time and number of employees, in order to complete the task efficiently and effectively. Therefore, there are the three challenges of workforce scheduling will be discuss and explain in this study.

The first challenge that have been identified this this study is the error in prediction. In the literature review had mentioned that there might be some necessary changes for the schedule or plan in some special conditions. For example, in the literature review the airlines industry might need to replan the flying schedule when some unexpectable problem occur and this might cause the customer satisfaction decrease. Thurs, to prevent the forecasting error occurs is a challenge for workforce scheduling, it is because an organisation will have a big number of workforce. Then each workforce obtains different skill and scheduling the working time of the workforce will become a challenge for the organisation. In the management of workforce there are two important issues one is to forecast the volume of task and second is to make a schedule for the workers to complete its task. So, this becomes a crucial part for an organisation to arrange its workforce. It is because if the manager forecast wrongly and underestimate the number of task or customer will cause them could not handle the task or customers efficiently which is known as under-staffing. Then this will cause the satisfaction of customer decline or the task cannot finish in time. On the other hands, if the manager arranges too many workforces in the same place will result in the waste of workforce and cost because the workers only have a little thing to do and this is known as over-staffing. So the workforces are not schedule effectively and efficiently due to the error in forecasting the volume of task. Next the reason of the error of prediction will occur is because the manager usually will used the previous experience or data to estimate. However, there will be many variables that might change and many unexpectable conditions may need to consider such as the activity of market, weather, and time of year and so on. Then due to the uncertainty, the original plan and schedule of the manager will be disturb. Therefore to predict accurately is a challenge in workforce scheduling.

The second challenge in workforce scheduling is to have an automatic system to manage the workforce scheduling information. From the case study, there is one problem that the company should take note that they do not have a complete and automatic system to manage their workforce. It is because they just simply let the employee manage their timetable and this might causes their task cannot finish efficiently. For example, in the case study the Asana is using result only work environment, Asana do not record the working time of employees. Therefore this will become a challenge for the operation team, because it is very hard for the operational team to manage the workforce when the company do not have a clear system. Then the employees are request to manage and access their schedule and attendance will be an issue for the operation team if they do not have an automatic system. Since the company do not have an automatic system, they might only record the attendance and schedule data in paper form. So the level of the clarity for the employee’s data is low compare with those companies that record the data in an automatic system digitally. In addition, the problem of record the schedule or attendance in paper form is the workers might record the time inaccurate and duplicity. Moreover without the automatic system, the operation team has to use more time to manage the workforce and this cause the operation team cannot focus on the important business activity.

The last challenge that has been identified is the distribution of workload. In the literature review had mentioned that one of the factors that influence the workforce scheduling is the capacity buffer and the distribution of workload. It is a challenge in workforce scheduling is because the management team have to distribute the workload in an equitable way. Besides that, there are many organisation do not own a comprehensive workforce scheduling that emphasize on both of the mental and physical workload. Then, without a comprehensive workforce scheduling, most of the organisation only emphasize on the physical workload. Therefore this had causes the distribution of workload will be unfair. Furthermore, the unfair workload will lead to a serious impact which is the satisfaction of workers for their job will decrease. So, the employee will make complaints on the unfair workload scheduling. Moreover, it may lead to high turnover rates in the organisation. Then it would be a trouble for the organisation because if the workers choose to leave the company, the company has to hire and train the new workers. Next, the process of recruitment might be costly and the tasks do not done efficiently. Thurs it is a challenge for the management team to distribute the workload equally and fair in order to prevent the negative impact occur in the company.