Office Staffing

greenspun.com : LUSENET : What keeps you up at night? : One Thread

How do you maintain adequate staffing from 8am-5pm when the employee hired to stay until 5:00 is off on leave? It sounds simple, I know, but are limited to choices because we are under a Union Contract. All other staff members work until 4:30. How do you decide who stays when they are all in different classifications? All 4 employees cover the front desk where the staffing problems occur, but none want to change their shift, nor work voluntarily until 5. Mandating someone means paying overtime. With the obvious problems with the economy right now, overtime is not reasonable. I welcome and appreciate all suggestions? What have you done before?

-- Tracena Fowler (tracena@hotmail.com), October 13, 2001

Answers

Keeping in mind that it is sometimes easier to provide advice than it is to execute, there a couple of things that I think you should be looking at:

1) Do you need to be open until 5pm? You state that the employee on leave is the only one who stays until 5pm, so is it really necessary to remain open the extra half an hour? Is there another way to manage the operation that would allow you to close at 4:30pm? This will allow you to not only address the current problem, but also change the working environment. Most people prefer to get off work earlier rather than later.

2) Typically a collective agreement provides, within the "Management Rights" article, for the ability of managers to change shifts arbitrarily. It is managements right to create the schedule of work. With reference to the question of "which one?", I think you need to start with the classification of the absent employee. If an attending employee is in that classification, the answer becomes relatively simple (from a practical perspective). If none of the attending employees is from the same classification as the absent one, you will have to consult your collective agreement to determine the next most appropriate classification. There are often clauses that provide for the temporary, short term, re-assignment of members from one classification into another for purposes just like you have described.

I hope this helps!

-- Mark Lang (mlang@ab.tri.ca), October 17, 2001.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ