When Employees Are Not Deployable

How often do your managers find themselves shutting down positions, reducing services, or scheduling overtime work to fill positions left open because employees assigned to perform work are not deployable?

Since the workforce may not be deployable 10% or more of their scheduled work hours each year, covering those hours can be very challenging. Part of the complexity centers around the many reasons for employee non-deployable. Additional complexity presents itself when an employee is at work but not deployable to a position.

Typically, the reasons why employees are not deployable fall in one or more of the following categories:

1. Predictable occurrences
2. Not Predictable occurrences
3. Scheduled (planned) occurrences
4. Not Scheduled (not planned) occurrences
5. Controllable occurrences
6. Not Controllable occurrences
7. Administrative occurrences
8. Serious Emergency occurrences

Covering Not Deployable Occurrences Organizations need to establish policy that directs the process for providing coverage, including alternatives to overtime, for employees that are not deployable.
Among the options available to shift managers are:

1. Use an automated shift scheduler to manage schedule assignment changes
2. Develop and implement strategies that maximize employee time off especially during that time of year employees consider prime time (summer months, breaks from school, holidays, special events like hunting season, etc)
3. Provide incentives to the workforce to use their vacation time when the workload is low. For example, give employees an extra day of vacation for every week of vacation taken during low production periods. From a financial perspective, there are many situations where this is a very good way to cover vacation time.
4. Staff your operation with the number of precisely calculated relief positions required to replace employees not deployable.
5. Use overtime to cover vacancies as they occur. While this is a very good use of overtime, it works best in an environment that does not experience large fluctuations in workload from week to week. However, overtime can be abused. When it is the result is fatigued employees, lower productivity, and increased costs.
6. Use temporary personnel.
7. Smooth out the variability of controllable absences using pre-determined limits. This places some of the burden on the workforce to spread out their absences and makes it easier to cover absences with fewer resources.