Barriers in Efficient Employee Scheduling

Many levels of intense activities continues in most organisations and many managers and team leaders find themselves working hard on a myriad of activities trying to get  best performance  from the resources as this is the underlying basis of the company’s success.

Optimum Human resource utilization by the means of efficient resource scheduling has been central to success for organization. Human capital is intangible and elusive and cannot be managed the way organizations manage jobs, products and technologies. There are many attributes of each individual and variables of each interactive resource which influence the total quality work out put. These can be categorized as  the  knowledge, skills, life experiences, morale and it’s motivation, abilities and interpersonal relations, to name a few. The value of employees is increased The profits earned by a company are governed to a major extent by Efficient Employee Scheduling, which is definitely a complex task. If this activity of Employee Scheduling  is carried out manually it becomes a very cumbersome process and is prone to many errors. Work flow requirements for the process of  good staff scheduling requires much more than what is achievable with paper and pencil or with spreadsheets. when employees  are working in shifts, have flexible working hours, work part time,share jobs and split works etc. it becomes especially complicated to manually schedule the resources . The use of resource scheduling software provides  a good alternative to overcome these and other barriers of manual resource scheduling.

The barriers in optimum resource utilization are mainly related to resource scheduling deficiencies, lack of educational and training records of the employee, inadequate staffing,  time and attendance, clear job description, job analysis, diversity (racial / ethnic diversity,  more women in the workforce, single-parent households, dual-career couples, domestic partners, working mothers and family/childcare), loss of employee loyalty,  health safety and security issues, the companies going global leading to multicultural environment, technological shift and use of Internet, older employees not trained in modern techniques or exposed to today’s work culture, need to accommodate working mothers and fathers through parental leaves, ensure equality for women in  respect to employment advancement opportunities and compensations, job sharing, part time and contractual employment with  their job analysis, more sensitivity to the growing need for policies, procedure to eliminate sexual harassment, conflicts and their resolution, work place  negativity etc.

On top of this, global nature of big organisations does not help in efficiently scheduling resources. Resources are more mobile than ever, this is good from operational point of view but a night mare for a resource coordinator, as they have to keep real time record or resource engagements and future commitments.   

For moving forward all these issues need to be addressed, as these are a barrier in high performance work practices. Environmental scanning, anticipation and flexible, foresighted and strategic deployment of resources is the key to ensure effective and efficient use of human talent to accomplish organizational goals and to gain that edge of advantage over competitors which makes the company not good but great. Using modern day resource management software that can manage different types of resources and show informative reports can also help to a great extent.