When evaluating staff, and staffing challenges at our sites, one of the things we wanted to focus on was short-term absenteeism. Around that, there may be voluntary turnover, people calling off, or people on vacation. One of the issues is not having enough staff on our team and also being able to find consistent staff.
The site decided to move towards a flex scheduling or time employee base. This way they’re able to bring in employees whether a month out or last second to help fill in gaps, especially around the easy jobs within the factory. The other goal of the flex team would also be to reduce the temporary workforce coming into the factory, relying less on temp agencies and more on in-house temporary employees.
To really push this solution, the site decided to use Indeavor as its flex scheduling tool. The employees typically go in about a month out and choose the voluntary days that they’re going to work. They have to work about two days a month to stay employed, but those employees can work upwards of 40 hours a week if needed. While these employees will typically be volunteering for a full shift coverage, whether that be eight or 12 hours, they may be brought in for shorter hours, just depending on the need. With all this volunteer labor pool, what we can do is fill it with our own in-house employees, rather than calling around and trying to find different temp agency employees.
Once we know we have these openings, we can go straight into Indeavor, utilize one of their algorithms, and schedule employees almost immediately. So there is no delay in time, making sure that we can fill our gaps. As a result of using FlexScheduling at the site, we did see a lot of positive outcomes. From this, we saw a reduction in turnover, and a reduction of overtime by roughly 8%, and we saw employee engagement increase, so these employees were overturning less. One of the things from the production standpoint that we saw was an increase in operational efficiencies.
We no longer had to stress about finding an employee to continue running, whether that was from a last-minute call-off or other type of absence. Within this as well, when we’re looking at our labor pools, we have fewer free labor, so we’re able to decrease our overhead costs.
