At the Planning Forum’s recent seminar and networking group in Dublin, a breakout group discussed the whole area of what made schedules inefficient and came up with some steps to overcoming the blockages.  Our July ‘Top Tips’ e-newsletter shares some of the ideas with you.  Have you any ideas beyond those below – if so why not pop along to our website  and share them with your peers.

Cross-training of staff.  Not always possible when training takes a lengthy period, but sometimes there is high volume, low skill or effort work where required skills can be quickly and easily cascaded to colleagues.  This then allows our WFM or Excel based scheduling systems to identify cross skilling or temporary secondments to plug gaps.

Split shifts. We assume people don’t want these.  However look at the options – some staff may live very close to the site and it then suits their lifestyle to do a couple of hours morning or evening.  Maybe staff would like 1 longer lunch per week meaning they occasionally slide into busier evening periods.  Maybe fitness fanatics who go to the gym after work would like to avail of cheaper gym rates at lunchtime.  The benefit of split shifts is apparent when volumes have a double spike at opposite ends of the day – there are ways to make them work.

Home working. Full blown homeworking solutions like those implemented at Shop Direct offer great flexibility – without the need to travel to work, staff find they can offer more options – often including slots as short as an hour in the day.  With the almost universal adoption of home broadband, should companies be considering ‘loaning out laptops’ so high performing staff can work from home 2-3 days a month as an option which is reciprocated with some flexibility in the hours they work?

Flexible staff.  The holy grail of planning – an unlimited pool of flexible staff willing to work anytime. We all know it is not going to happen, but a flexible approach to requests for schedule changes can quickly become a tool to encourage staff to be more flexible themselves.  Questions such as “If we let you work an hour earlier next week to allow you to attend that event – would you slide an hour later one day the following week?” should be asked to let staff see that flexibility is a 2 way street.  Choosing the moment makes it harder for staff to say no, and gives us the opportunity to get business related shift changes in place.

Close eye on schedule adherence.  Are we our own worst enemies?  We live in an information overload environment but we don’t always act sensibly.  Many schedule shortfalls are caused by how me measure and monitor adherence.  Without advocating a “you are 5 seconds late” philosophy, what reports can be put in place to highlight repeat offenders and prevent backlogs of unanswered calls moving through the day due to non adherence.

“Tag” breaks.  One radical solution which can work well in small teams or centres is that we stop scheduling breaks at all.  The team are given parameters and maybe a flag / ball or other visual indicator so that only the person in possession can be on a break.  That way they realise how busy it is at times of the day and can manage offline activity as a team themselves based on the current workload.  Crazy as it seems to some of us – it does tend to work due to the small team of advisors taking ownership upon themselves.

Think about how we present cost of non-adherence.  In Call Centre world we typically tell people that them changing shifts / non-adhering etc... will mean a drop in Service Level of X%.  What does this mean to the average staff member?  If we told them that moving to a different shift was costing the company £XXX per day or £YYYYYY per annum – would they sit up and take notice?  Take a minute before presenting any data to see if the figures being used make sense to the recipient.

Do we have to grant every Flexible Working Request?  Has your company developed a culture where flexible working requests are granted almost without thought?  The weirdness of language means that these so-called flexible requests are translated to mean “Inflexible working requests” in the vast majority of cases.  Remember, they are a request and the business has 28 days to consider and if necessary reject if not meeting business needs.  It is perfectly reasonable and legal to offer alternatives which are a compromise or don’t put the business at risk of missing service level.

As I mentioned earlier, there are many more tips and methods to increase schedule efficiency – why not share your favourite below.