Déhora – In the next few years, many challenges related to workforce planning management are to be expected in the public transportation sector. Mostly because in this particular sector a substantial part of the workforce will soon reach retirement age. Questions that are already keeping the minds of many employers busy are therefore: How can we make sure that these employees will be able to work until retirement age in a healthy manner? What can we, as employers, offer the younger workers that are now joining the workforce? How can we attract more female workers to enter a male-dominated public transportation branch? And how can we secure and foster diversity within this sector? Fortunately, the answer to all these questions is already existent: Self scheduling.
Self scheduling means that you, as an employer, allow your employees to make their own schedules. Some of the many benefits of self scheduling are that employees can tailor their schedules to their individual physical and social needs. For employees this can also mean that combining their work with possible caring tasks all of a sudden becomes a lot easier. This will result in more people being able to start working (more) and this, in turn, promotes diversity of the workforce.
With all the benefits that self scheduling brings to the table you probably wonder why not every single employer in the country is using self scheduling to make schedules. The reason is very simple: Even though many employers are interested in self scheduling and do see the benefits it will bring, they are also fearful and see many hurdles on the road. This because practically every organisational change will meet with resistance from employers having to undergo this organisational change.
Thanks to Déhora, many organizations in Belgium and the Netherlands have already successfully introduced this concept. Within a set of rules and requirements defined by, for example, a management or a director, staff are responsible for choosing their own shifts. From our many years of experience, we know that the scheduler's intervention is relatively limited and the concept is well-functioning, and none of the companies have ever wanted to go back to the original model.
With the current state of the labor market and the new generation of employees, it is only a matter of time before the management understands what employees actually want, and before they move on to this way of managing labor force planning. It is obvious, however, that whoever does it first will gain a great competitive advantage for the Czech market for some time.
