Author: Jim

Peripheral Vision

Once, back in my Navy days, I was the Chief Engineer on a cruiser.  This was a 24/7 job where it seemed that everything was a priority all of the time.  I was having a conversation with the commanding officer about setting priorities and he said, “When in doubt, shoot the wolf closest to the sled.”

I’ll never forget that bit of advice and it has served me well over the years.

However, if you are not in a perpetual crisis mode, if you are in the game for the long run, this may not be the right advice for you.

Focusing in on one issue can cause any of the following problems: (1) you may miss an opportunity because you ignore a complimentary issue that would be easily solved in parallel with your current one, (2) Fixing your issue may cause another issue to pop up somewhere else, (3) Building a coalition with others allows you to get help on your issue in return for help on someone else’s issue and (5) The squeaky wheel gets the grease, not necessarily the one that needs is the most.

At Shiftwork Solutions, we are most often asked: Do you have schedules?  Do you engage the workforce?  Can you tell us how many people we need to staff our needs?

The answers to all of these are YES!  Those are easy things to do.  However, if these are the only issues addressed, your shift scheduling solution will almost certainly be less successful than its full potential.

Let me give you an example:  A bakery with 750 employees wants to go to a 24/7 operation.  They need a schedule.  They would like to engage the workforce.  They want to know how many people they will need to hire.

We know that a schedule change in production has many more moving parts than just a day-on-day-off pattern.  It’s time to use our Peripheral Vision; looking for those out of focus issues that are part of the whole but are not currently right in front of us.  For this project, we also looked at the following:

  1. What are your labor alternatives (temps, part-time, full time and overtime)?  What does each of these alternatives cost and what makes each of them advantageous in their own way?
  2. When do you do sanitation and why?  Can you do fewer sanitations?  Can you do shorter sanitations?  What is the limiting factor on how fast you can do sanitation?  Are there capital improvements that will help?  How much will these costs and how much will they save?
  3. When do you do R&D?  Is if flexible?  Is it consistent?
  4. How much maintenance is needed: Weekly, daily, preventative or corrective?  How are you currently staffed to conduct maintenance?  Does that schedule match your needs or do you find you are both understaffed and overstaffed within the same week?
  5. Can we do things like changeovers, maintenance, and sanitation in parallel rather than in series (at the same time instead of one after the other)?
  6. What is the cost of capital?  What is the Net Present Value of a delay in acquiring major equipment?
  7. Are the sales variable or flat?  Are they growing?
  8. What is the shelf-life of your product?  How fast do you turn over your warehouse?  Do you co-pack or use co-packers?
  9. What are the goals corporate has given you to meet?
  10. If we solved this problem, would it come up again in a year or two?
  11. Was is the local employment level?  What is your competition for labor doing that you are not?
  12. How long does it take to train for different critical positions?
  13. What’s your turnover; especially in critical positions?
  14. How is your quality department staffed in relation to production?
  15. Are your vendors and outside material providers flexible enough to meet any schedule that you put in place?  If not, what are their restrictions?
  16. Do you consider your first-line supervisors superior or adequate?  Do you promote from within or bring in outsiders?
  17. Is the workforce accustomed to participating in some production decisions?
  18. Do you have a continuous improvement program?  How advanced do you consider it?  Is there a way that a better schedule can facilitate this effort?
  19. What is your OSHA recordable rate?  How does this compare to the industry standard?  Why do you think you are doing so well or so poorly?

As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts.  Nothing is ever static.  All of these are in a constant state of flux.   Priorities shift back and forth and every day there is a different wolf that is closest to the sled.

We know this because at Shiftwork Solutions we have 30 years of experience working with companies to address all of these issues – in unison.

Anything short will give you a less than optimal solution to whatever situation you are looking into at the moment.

Call us.  We can help.

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005 to discuss your operations and how we can help you solve your shift work problems. You can also complete our contact form and we will call you.

Staffing? – Good Question

Considerations for answering – How Many Do I Hire?

I’m a shiftwork expert so my posts are always centered on shiftwork operations.  That doesn’t mean that there isn’t something that a non-shiftwork operation might find helpful.  My hope is that every reader of every post is able to find value.

Most of my work, about 70%, is with companies that want to expand their operations while minimizing capital investment.  Basically, I help answer the question “How can I get more out of the equipment I already have?”

Once that’s been determined, my bread and butter is “process and implementation”.  I help them find where they want to go.  I valuate that destination and then I help them to get there.

One question is always “How many people do I have to add to get to where we want to go?”

There are short and long answers to this question.

If you are running three shifts, Monday – Friday and want to go to a 24/7 operation, you need to add 33% more operators.  You will also need to add another supervisor.

That was the short answer.

Here is the longer one…

This is really more of a list of considerations rather than The Long Answer.

First, we have to land on an overtime number.  This is more than just creating an arbitrary goal of so many days or hours of work in a row.  Try answering the following questions for a start:

  • How much overtime do you want to have?
  • What does overtime cost (the cost to the company not income to earner) as opposed to fully loaded straight time?
  • What is the workforce’s appetite for overtime?
  • Is the process seasonal in that sometimes you need more people than at other times? What is the level of operator specialization?
  • What is your turnover?
  • What is the lead time between needing a new hire to having a fully trained person?

The overtime issue is a big one since, with a fixed workload, overtime is a function of staffing.  More people = lower overtime.

If production is going to run more days, what does this imply for support operations?  Will quality, maintenance, and sanitation requirements be expanded? Often the answers are something like this:

  • Quality will be affected slightly.  They will need more people but not 33% more.  Maybe something like 10% more.
  • Maintenance will actually become more efficient as you no longer have to be staffed at a level where you can fix everything on a weekend.  When running 24/7, maintenance is often spread out on the more productive weekday shifts.  This may actually lower your maintenance staffing.
  • Sanitation crews sometimes drop to zero staffing.  This is because 24/7 operations no longer sanitize in accordance with a fixed day or time of day schedule.  Instead, they run for as long as they can and then the operators simply become sanitors and clean up their own lines; starting back up as quickly as possible.

​You don’t need 33% more Plant Managers, HR Managers or Engineers.  There is definitely a “cheaper by the dozen” affect when it comes to many of the higher level non-direct labor positions.

Clearly, if production goes to a 24/7 pattern, not everyone at the plant needs to do so as well.  In fact, there is a good chance, depending on your operation, that not all of the production needs to go.  It’s not unusual for some lines to go to 24/7 while others remain on a 5-day schedule.  In some instances, running your high volume equipment more hours will actually take fewer people instead of more if you are able to retire some of you older, more labor-intensive capital.

So there you have it….the longer answer.

The point here is that you need to do your homework.  Look at the fully loaded cost of a single employee.  Hire too many and things start to get expensive in a hurry.  My rule of thumb is to initially staff lean when in doubt.  If you are wrong, you can use overtime until you get the staffing right.  Coming in with too many people to start with will cause “income shock” to those that just lost all of their overtime AND you run the risk of overstaffing which is expensive and only fixable by painful layoffs.
 

Call Us and We Can Help

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005 to discuss your operations and how we can help you solve your shift work problems. You can also complete our contact form and we will call you.

Yes, it’s personal

I’m often asked, “Jim, what is the single most important thing we, as an organization, can do to better facilitate a schedule change.”

My answer is always the same – “Find a way to see the event through the eyes of a shift worker.”  In other words, walk that mile in their shoes.

Companies don’t change schedules for the fun of it.  They know it has the potential to disrupt everything from planning to maintenance to hiring and training.  It’s a big undertaking and not to be taken likely.

When companies make the decision to change, they always approach the workforce with the case for change.  This “case” nearly always boils down to “We are doing this because of the needs of the business.”

While this is a great reason for the change, it does not do a lot to calm the workforce’s concerns.

Here is why…

To the company, a shift schedule tells people when to be at work.  To a shift worker, a shift schedule tells them when they DON’T have to be at work.

In other words, it tells them when they can live the rest of their lives; that part of their life not at work but instead with their families or hobbies or whatever they may be passionate about.

Yes, they will understand “the needs of the business” but its also important to understand their perspective.

When you touch a schedule, even slightly, you are touching their personal lives.  Change a start time by 15 minutes and watch the fireworks as employees can no longer pick up their kids or attend a school or catch the early bus home.

You may say “We are changing the schedule to meet the needs of the business” but they are hearing “We are going to change your family life to facilitate the needs of the business.”

There is a difference.

Recognizing this difference will change the way you approach the project.  The right approach will change the outcome for the better.
Call Us and We Can Help

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005 to discuss your operations and how we can help you solve your shift work problems. You can also complete our contact form and we will call you.

5 Signs that you may need a new shift schedule

Shift schedules rarely fail overnight.  Typically, there are plenty of warning signs; signs that tell you to take action before it’s too late.  Here are the 5 biggest warning signs.

#1: You have idle equipment while still not producing enough to meet customer demands.  There can be a lot of reasons for this; nearly all of which point to a schedule that does not have the right people in the right place at the right time.  Product flow, staffing, maintenance and production order variability can all be addressed with the right shiftwork structure.

#2: Maintenance is blaming equipment availability for a downward trend in equipment up-time.  You can’t fix something while it’s running.  The result is often a solution like “We’ll wait until the weekend to fix it.”  This is fine until you find that leaving too much to the weekend ends up with an overly fatigued maintenance group with not enough hours on the weekend to fix everything.  Scheduling equipment, like scheduling people, can improve maintenance accomplishment while still getting the production hours you need.

#3: Absenteeism is going up as overtime starts to wear down your workforce.  As overtime goes up, two things will happen.  First of all, your workforce will start to get tired.  Secondly, they will notice that they are now making a lot of money and can afford to take time off.  This is a “death spiral”  situation in that it is self-perpetuating and will only get worse.  Staffing will impact overtime but to do so effectively, you must have a shiftwork structure to support the newly resized workforce.

#4: Local competition for labor is causing problems with recruitment and retention.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard something like “Amazon just opened a mega-facility down the street and is hiring all of our employees away from us.”  The right schedule, one that is a good fit for your workforce as well as your business can help with this.  If wages are a concern, look for ways to get overtime to that 20% of your workforce that wants all they can get.  Overtime costs your company about the same as fully loaded straight time.  This means when you pay overtime, your employees make 50% more but your cost per hour is virtually unaffected.  Don’t lose your workforce because of wage pressures or quality of life issues.  The right shiftwork structure can help.

#5: Productivity metrics are dropping as equipment runtime-hours are on the rise.  If you are running more and more hours with the same old schedule, then you are probably seeing an increase in overtime.  While overtime is not a bad idea in many instances, it can eventually lead to worker fatigue.  This is especially true if you spread it evenly across all shifts.  Remember, not all employees want the same amount of overtime.  As fatigue goes up, so will accidents, quality issues, and absenteeism.  You make find, for example, that running 6 days a week yields more output than running 5 days.  However, if you didn’t change schedules, a 20% increase in runtime will yield significantly less than a 20% increase in output.

In summary, don’t underestimate the impact of having the right shiftwork structure.  Fixing this issue is often the most expeditious and cost-effective way of improving your overall operations.

Call Us and We Can Help

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005 to discuss your operations and how we can help you solve your shift work problems. You can also complete our contact form and we will call you.

The impact of overtime on salaried personnel

Since President Obama signed (28 May 2016) legislation raising the minimum bar for salaried people to qualify for overtime, I have been getting two questions: (1) What does this mean and (2) How does it affect my shiftwork operation.

The answer to the first is fairly straight forward.  If you have a salaried person at your facility that is being paid less than $47, 476 a year, then you must pay overtime at the rate of time and one-half for all hours worked in excess of 40 in a pay week.

The second is less clear.  My hope is that a few observations on my part will help you to see the impact on your operation.

First of all, I will be speaking to the role of direct supervision of hourly employees in a shiftwork operation.  This is often an industrial setting but need not be so.

Supervisors are typically salaried.  Sometimes they are home-grown in that they come from the existing hourly workforce.  Sometimes they are brought in from the outside.

This new overtime rule means that if you are paying your supervisors less than about $26 an hour, then you must pay them overtime when they work over 40 hours in a week.

Let’s be clear, someone coming to work for a wage or any other benefit represents an agreement between two parties: (1) the employer and (2) the employee.

The employer says “I will compensate you this way if you work here.”  The employee says “I will work there for this compensation.”

To this extent, the law may be self-correcting.  Employers faced with paying overtime may offer a lower starting salary while employees, may accept a lower starting salary knowing that overtime will be added to it.

Now, “compensation” can mean a lot of things.  Historically, being promoted to a supervision role means that you get more money per hour.  However, this does not always correspond to “more money overall.”  Frequently, supervisors get a higher hourly rate (paid as salary) but then lose out on what may have been a significant amount of income from overtime; overtime they are no longer eligible for.  There is no shortage of people that have turned down salaried roles because they didn’t want the pay cut.

Management often argues, correctly, that the compensation for supervision goes beyond wages.  Salaried positions often make “decision-makers” out of “decision takers.”  For many, the draw of a position of responsibility can be huge.

Salaried positions sometimes pay overtime-type wages if you come in on a day off while not paying it if you work a longer than scheduled day.

Salaried positions sometimes offer compensatory time off if you work extra hours.

Managers hire a salaried person and tell them “This amount of salary includes compensation for the expected extra hours you will work.”  In other words, they are saying that they are building the overtime wages into the offered salary.

Maybe there is a company car or free lunches or a better vacation.

Probably one of the biggest reasons someone will take on a salaried position is that it represents a stepping stone to something even bigger; perhaps a promotion to the level of really big dollars.

In the end, it still comes down to the agreement.  Compensation = Filled Position.

If you are paying your supervisor less than $47,476 per year,  then I have to say, “You get what you pay for.”  I know that can be harsh in certain markets that only provide the thinnest of margins.  Still, good leaders are hard to come by.  There is competition for them and if you don’t pay them enough, they will leave for greener pastures.

Of all the companies I have worked with over the last 28 years, probably none of them paid less than the $47K bar set for overtime wages (in today’s dollars).  Discussion about this law states that it protects 4.2 million salaried employees.  In truth, they may be protected but are probably not affected.

In short, the impact of this law is far more political than practical.  Chances are great that you will be unaffected in some major way.

Call Us and We Can Help

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005 to discuss your operations and how we can help you solve your shift work problems. You can also complete our contact form and we will call you.

Change Management

Let’s suppose someone walked into your office and said, “I just did some math and it looks like we need to make a change.” At that moment, you should realize that the easy part of Change Management has just been completed.

Yes, I’m saying that “Math is the easy part.” Putting pen to paper and arriving at a conclusion that calls for change require only an idea and mostly high school level math skills. This is really only step one in what could be a long and complicated process.

Step One: Identify the change to be made.

This post is not about Step One. It’s about all of the other steps that must follow in order for change to be successfully implemented. Consider this the Cliff Notes on Change from someone who has spent the last 28 years making the most complicated and emotionally loaded change a company can undertake – changing shift schedules.

Here is how I do it…in no particular order:

Communicate. Talk to the people who are affected; letting them know the Why’s, When’s and How’s. Talk to the people that are unaffected but near the periphery of the change. They will hear rumors and if you leave them out of it, they will assume the worse.

Find the Feather. In every change, there are going to be good things and bad things; not necessarily balanced and not necessarily spread equally across all affected parties. Look for the “feather in the cap” as it may apply to everyone involved. Give them something to look forward to; something positive that will result from the change. Don’t leave it to them to find this for themselves.

Communicate. When telling people about the change, don’t overwhelm your audience. Too much information too quickly will result in the opposite of what you hope to occur. Instead of understanding, you will create confusion. With confusion comes anger and resistance. Meter out your information in digestible chunks.

Perspective: Understand the perspective of your stakeholders. I guarantee it’s not the same as yours. For you to address their issues, you need to know what they are concerned about as well as what they value. For example, when changing shift schedules, the workforce will care very little about how such a change strengthens a company’s competitive position. They care about how it affects their income and their time off.

Communicate. Do not hide the downside of a change. In fact, actively bring it up. Doing so will let your audience know that what you are proposing isn’t just a snow job. They will see downsides and you ignoring them will seem disingenuous. In presentations, always address the elephant in the room early on. People will know it’s there and they won’t hear a thing you say until you address it.

Create Ownership. Actively look for degrees of freedom when multiple options will lead you to the same result. Next, solicit input from your stakeholders as to what options they would most like to see pursued. They may also have options you may not have considered. In short, get them involved in the solution. If the change reflects, at least in part, input from affected parties, those parties will be more likely to support the outcome.

Communicate. (As you can see by now, I’m a proponent of communication.) When deciding what to communicate, be aware of The Fear of the Unknown. In the face of unanswered questions, people will make up their own answers. This is not a good thing. We all inherently have what is known as negative bias. In short, our survival skills depend on our never underestimating a situation. We assume the worse because the penalty for being wrong is less than if we mistakenly assume the best. For example, Caveman Jim sees a brown blob off to the right. He can assume it’s a bear and runs or he can assume it’s a rock and ignore it. If it’s a rock but he wrongly assumed it was a bear, he ran away for no reason. If he assumes it’s a rock and ignores it, but it’s a bear, then caveman Jim is going to have a bad day. To overcome this negative bias, eliminate the unknown. Communicate clearly and often. Perfect information makes for smoother change processes.

Leadership. Understand that there are different leadership styles and different situations call for different styles. Coach others to help achieve your goals when possible. Be authoritative as needed but remember, people, don’t like to be told what to do. Coercive styles are rarely productive. Look for ways to empower people. Treat them with respect. Listen and respond. You want people to follow your lead by choice, not by directive.

Communicate. I’ve heard over the years that people need to hear things at least 3 times before they sink in. While this may not be a law of physics, it certainly seems to be good advice. Not only must you communicate the same message several times, but you must also do so using different methodologies. Group meetings are great, as are PowerPoint presentations; but they don’t work for everyone. Some people will just want to spend some informal time with the “message giver” to help them better understand what is being communicated. Some people need to read a message instead of hearing it. Many of us need some “soak time” that will allow us to process a message before we can respond. Look for innovative ways to communicate the same messages multiple times.

The 5% rule. It has been my experience that 5% of every workforce, managers included, come to work to say “no”. They are like Eeyore on Winnie the Pooh. “It will never work.” I’m not going to tell you to disregard someone that says this. After all, they may have a point. What I’m going to recommend is that you don’t over-empower these nay-sayers. Accept the fact that you will not get everyone on board with your plan. Trying to do so will have the following two consequences: (1) Your plan will eventually morph into something you didn’t originally intend and (2) You will never get that 5% on board anyway.

Communicate. Don’t put this on your to-do list and then cross it off when completed. You will never be done communicating. From conception to congratulations, communications will play a vital role in the success of any change process. Communicate timing. Communicate intent. Communicate changes in the plan. Communicate recognition. Communicate progress. Then communicate some more.

And finally, all change is loss and all loss must be grieved. I don’t say this as a low note. It is an inevitable part of life. Accept it, not as a roadblock to be overcome but as a sign that you have in fact reached that point where the inevitability of change has arrived and it is time to move on; time to implement that change. We get over this grief. Sometimes we need help but we always get over it. In the end, you will have made a change for the better.

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005 to discuss your operations and how we can help you solve your shift work problems. You can also complete our contact form and we will call you.

Alertness on 12-hour night shifts

The problem with all night shifts, regardless of shift length, is that they don’t match up with the lifestyles of the rest of the world. On nights, you are expected to be awake when everyone else is asleep and then you are to sleep when everyone else is awake. A pretty tall order.

Most shift workers on nights report getting less sleep than on any other shift. There are several reasons for this. First of all, if your circadian rhythms are set to keep you awake during the days and asleep at night, they will actually be working against you. Secondly, we don’t like to sleep during daylight hours because we have family and social opportunities that we don’t want to miss. Finally, there is the sleep environment itself. It is hard to completely isolate yourself from the lights and sounds of the day when you are trying to sleep.

All of this means we sleep less when working nights. The problem with 8-hour shifts is that there are a lot of them. This generally means that the more shifts in a row you work, the farther you fall behind in your sleep. At the same time, the more shifts in a row you work, the abler your body is to match your circadian rhythms to your new sleep pattern, thus improving sleep. So, on the one hand, more days in a row means more fatigue while, on the other hand, more shifts in a row means better sleep – eventually.

Now let’s consider 12-hour shifts. There are a lot fewer shifts to work if you switch from 8-hour shifts to 12’s. This generally means that you will only be working 2-4 night shifts in a row instead of 5-7 8-hour shifts in a row.

One popular schedule pattern is the 2-3-2. On this schedule, you work 2 or 3 nights in a row before getting a 2 or 3-day break. The good news is that you don’t work too many nights in a row so you never fall too far behind in your sleep. The bad news is that since you work fewer nights in a row, you never get a chance to adjust to the shift. Additionally, you only have a few days off between shifts (on some patterns) which means you may have trouble readjusting to days (on your days off) as well.

If you go to a 4-on-4-off pattern, you will work more nights in a row and thus, fall farther behind in your sleep. However, the more nights in a row means (1) your body will adjust better to the night shift than if you worked fewer nights in a row and (2) more in a row means fewer times that you need to readjust to nights when you return to work and finally (3) you have 4 days off in a row which gives you a chance to adjust to days on your days off.

A 2-3-2 pattern means that you have to adjust to night shifts 78 times a year. A 4-on-4-off pattern only has 46 adjustments to nights in a year.

So, what is best for you? It comes down to your own behavior. If you find that you cannot adjust to nights at all, it is better to work fewer night shifts in a row to limit your accumulated sleep debt. If you adjust easily to nights, work more of them in a row to minimize those difficult first couple of days that we all go through when making the adjustment.

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005.

Lean Manufacturing

Lean manufacturing is one of those rare production crazes that actually works. People that have never heard of it might immediately think it implies reducing the size of the workforce. This is simply not the case.

Lean manufacturing means to produce with the goal of zero waste. So the question is, “What is waste?” Waste is finished goods inventory sitting in the warehouse not doing anything. Waste is a downstream work center waiting while upstream work centers are falling behind. Waste is time spent looking for tools because the workspace is a mess.

If it is not adding value, it is waste.

The shift work structure used in a Lean Manufacturing environment is extremely important. It would be a wild coincidence if every work center needed exactly the same amount of coverage every day.

In actual practice, companies try to do just that. They put everyone on the same schedule and then hope that the workload balances out. When it doesn’t, waste is created either by high overtime, high inventories or idle work centers.

Lean manufacturing works. Make sure your shift schedule works as well.

Call or text us today at (415) 763-5005.

Getting the Workforce Involved

I recently received a telephone call from a company that was having problems with their shift schedule.  The problem, it seemed, was that people were complaining about the schedule.  The company could hear the complaints but was having a hard time interpreting what they were hearing.  Was it just a few “squeaky wheels” doing all of the complaining or was there a general rumbling throughout?  Was there a specific problem or were there several issues?

The obvious concern the company had was that they needed to qualify and quantify the problem before they could take action to fix it.

This is where we came in.  Our two-survey process accomplishes the following:

The entire workforce is involved.

One person, one survey eliminates the “squeaky wheel” issue.

The first survey finds the problem, the second survey narrows down the possible solutions

The surveys made sure everyone knows what is going on.

The results from the surveys are shared with the workforce making the process “transparent” and the results data-driven.

If you are planning a change to your shift schedule, regardless of how small and apparently inconsequential, get the workforce involved.  It is their schedule.  They have structured their lifestyles around it.  Any change will have an impact on them and their families.  Getting them involved helps them to understand what is happening, why it is happening and when it is happening.  It also lets them have some input into the final solution.

Call or text us today at (415) 858-8585.
 

When is high overtime appropriate?

We are typically asked about ways to lower overtime. It is clear that most companies view overtime as a necessary evil. They try to get it as low as possible and consider all overtime reduction as cost savings.

In many instances, they are right. However, just as often, they are wrong.

From a pure tangible cost perspective, overtime probably is about 10% more expensive than straight time.  This means you can reduce overtime costs by adding more people (more straight time hours).  However, suppose you try to do this but overshoot the mark.  You hire so many more straight time hours that you now have more than you need.  You are overstaffed.

Being overstaffed is about fifteen to twenty times more expensive than being understaffed.  If you are understaffed you pay for overtime instead of straight time.  This probably comes to an extra couple of dollars an hour.  If you are overstaffed, you are paying full wages and benefits to hours you don’t need.  Depending on your hourly rate, this could be anywhere from $20 per hour to well over $40 per hour.

So back to the topic at hand.  When is high overtime appropriate.

The short answer is – when your workload is highly variable.

A longer answer would be – when your workload is highly variable and the skill set you require of your workforce is not readily available using any of the traditional workforce arguments (i.e. part-time and temporary labor).

If you staff to match peak workloads and your workload is variable, then you will find yourself overstaffed quite often.

If you staff to match you lower workloads, you will find yourself understaffed.  This means overtime.

The greater the variability, the more idle time you will incur if you staff to peak production and the more overtime you will incur if you staff to minimum production.  Since overtime is significantly less costly, you will pay less if your staffing tends towards the minimum production.

There are ways to schedule your workforce to closely match a variable workload.  The more predictably variable it is, the better the match becomes.

Call or text us today at (415) 858-8585.