Buy your hours!

Thought I would mention another scheduling method I came up with recently. I was beginning to have problems with my "draft" method because the number of people needing to be scheduled has risen to about 25. With that amount of people, draft scheduling can take hours and since there are fewer shifts available per person, it seems silly to wait around for an hour an a half to pick three shifts.

My solution was this: Shift the burden of time it takes to schedule back onto me and away from the workers by giving them an availability form to fill out. I have used availability forms in the past, but I discontinued their use because it was too difficult to get people to select the hours that needed covering. When you fill out your form independently from everyone else then desirable shifts aren't "eliminated" from the running, so you choose only the shifts you like the most.

My goal on the availability sheet, then, was to provide enough incentive for people to diversify their desired shifts so that all shifts would be covered and I wouldn't have to assign anyone. You may recall from my previous posts that my mantra is: the perception of choice makes a happy worker, and a happy worker is a good worker. Therefore, it is important to me that everyone feel that the shifts they are working are the ones they chose.

To accomplish this, I gave every participant $10 (not really $10, just on paper) that they each HAD to spend on the available shifts for the week. They could spend it all in one place, or they could split it up 10 different ways, but all the money had to be "spent". The amount of money spent on a shift qualified as the priority number for the shift. That is, a person spending $6 on Wednesday had priority over somebody spending $3 of Wednesday. In order for someone to get the hours they wanted they would have to spend enough money in one place to earn priority. I was concerned, however, that many people would just spend $10 on one day, and be unwilling to work other days that were less desirable, but still necessary. To counter this, I added one stipulation: if there were any holes I would assign those people first who had spent the most money on one single shift. I hoped this rule would cause people to split their money up so that they would be choosing more times, and giving me more flexibility.

My plan was not perfect. In fact, there are a lot of things about this method that need to be improved. First among them is the problem that there were still too many options for people so that certain undesirable days still did not receive enough money. There is an easy solution to this. All I need to do is split up all the days into groups. Group 1 would be desirable days. Group 2 would be less desirable, and group 3 would be least desirable. In each group everyone would be expected to spend $10, so everyone would have to pick days they didn't like as much, but at the same time they would still have the option of picking WHICH undesirable ones they would work. I think this is a simple fix with versatile implications, and as a matter of personal interest I wonder how many groups I could divide the shifts into while still giving the appearance of choice.