I’m excited to be here with you to talk about an issue that affects not only workforce managers but also union employees across industries. Let me start with a simple question. Have you ever heard about a missed overtime opportunity?
Not from your supervisor, but from a coworker in the break room? That’s usually when frustration sets in, and for a lot of union employees, that’s where a grievance begins. Scheduling is the heartbeat of daily operations, and in unionized environments, it comes with unique challenges. Today, I want to unpack some of those challenges and talk about how smarter scheduling can empower employees, reduce grievances, and build trust.
First, let’s talk about transparency. In many organizations, scheduling practices aren’t clear. Employees don’t always know when overtime opportunities are posted or why certain people were chosen for shifts. So how do they find out? Typically, through word of mouth, they hear that a colleague picked up a shift they thought they were eligible for, and that discovery is often the spark that leads to a grievance. Researchers and labor studies emphasize that opaque scheduling practices are a major driver of dissatisfaction. Transparency, on the other hand, is one of the strongest ways to prevent disputes before they even begin.
Now, once a grievance is filed, here’s what happens. The process kicks off a formal multi-step investigation, which means documentation, deadlines, and multiple levels of review. It’s a process designed to ensure fairness, but it takes a tremendous amount of time. HR teams, managers, and union reps all end up bogged down in paperwork and auditing instead of focusing on solving the actual problem. The time investment is huge, and for many organizations, it’s not sustainable.
And here’s the flip side. Not every grievance even gets filed. Why? Because often the employee doesn’t realize they’ve been wronged until it’s too late. Union contracts usually set strict timeframes for filing grievances. If an employee doesn’t discover the issue quickly or doesn’t understand that what happened was even a violation, they missed the chance to act the end result, missed opportunities, unaddressed concerns, and growing distrust in the system.
Finally, let’s talk about complex scheduling. Administrators aren’t ignoring union rules because they want to. They’re often forced to because the rules themselves are so complex. Think about it. Seniority dates, rotating overtime lists, shift differentials, and training requirements, all layered on top of one another.
Keeping track of it all manually is nearly impossible. And what happens when a deadline is looming and the schedule has to get published, or a critical last-minute scheduling vacancy needs to be filled? Corners get cut. Rules are bent and grievances follow. In fact, studies show that automated compliance can reduce scheduling complaints and scheduling-related grievances by as much as 98%.
That tells you just how often manual processes lead to mistakes and disputes. Let’s pause and think about the impact here for employees. The lack of transparency and fairness creates frustration, disengagement, and the feeling that the system is stacked against them. For schedulers and administrators, the sheer burden of managing rules and grievances is exhausting.
Burnout is common, and accuracy is hard to maintain. Valuable time and energy are spent fighting preventable battles. Wasting resources that could be better spent advocating for bigger strategic wins for their members. So what’s the way forward? The answer is smarter scheduling. When we bring in technology to support these complex processes, everything changes.
Employees gain real-time visibility into overtime and shift opportunities. Rules are enforced automatically, so fairness is built right into the system. And audit trails make grievances easier to resolve, and in many cases prevent them altogether. Most importantly, trust is restored. Employees feel confident that they’re being treated fairly, and administrators gain back time to focus on people, not paperwork.
The path to empowering union employees is clear: implement transparency, reduce administrative burden, and enforce fairness through smarter scheduling. When we empower employees with transparency, we don’t just prevent grievances; we build trust, and when we empower administrators with automation, we allow them to focus on what matters most, supporting their people.
That’s the future of workforce management and unionized environments. Thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to continuing the conversation.