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Changing to new Shift Patterns |
City Council Open Air Car Parks
Wardens Staff Roster
Synopsis
An English City Council wanted to extend their car park wardens daily hours and introduce 7 day working. They had difficulty creating a new staff roster and determining how many staff they needed in addition to the current compliment. My analysis of their requirements showed they needed one third less staff than they currently employed.
Statement of Problem.
The City Council employed 6 staff to patrol their car parks, Monday to Saturday, from 8am-6pm. They wanted to extend this to 8pm each evening and introduce an extra shift on Sundays. No one in the department had ever created a new staff roster before. The current roster had evolved over time and the staff had worked to the same pattern of shifts from the day they started in the department. The departments initial assumption was that extra staff would be needed, since extra hours had to be covered. But, no one knew how to set up a roster to cover this extra time.
Evaluation
In order to start planning a staff roster, the initial starting point is always the same. What is the workload? The workload on the Wardens is proportional to the number of cars parking in the car parks. The car parks are open 24 hours per day and parking is charged for by the hour during the day, a common practise throughout Britain. Every motorist must purchase a car park ticket in advance for the duration of their stay. The wardens work was mostly about helping motorists with problems rather than issuing car parking tickets(fines), if they overstayed the time on their ticket, or did not have a ticket in the first place. Issuing and processing car parking fines is time consuming and is not a primary reason for employing the wardens, having a controlled throughput of cars into the city centre is the primary reason. Metering the time is a proven effective method of controlling the numbers of cars in city centres. The wardens are employed to deter abuse of this method of control and the best way to do this is by having a visible presence. Issuing car parking fines is not as effective as the threat of having a fine. Hence the wardens walk their beat around the city car parks and are conspicuous The more conspicuous they are, the better the overall control of the car parks. Too few staff and too many staff on patrol produce similar reactions from the public, annoyance. Having too few staff and the public take advantage of this by overstaying their ticketed time, if they buy a ticket at all, and this leads to a lack of car parking facilities in the city centre and causes annoyance to traders and their customers. Having too many staff leads to every one who overstays their time being fined irrespective of the reason for having overstayed. The fine is large enough for most people to complain to the car park department and try to explain the reason for overstaying the ticketed time, the usual reason being that it was not their fault. The process of dealing with each complaint, whether in person at the time of the offence, or later in writing as a means of mitigating the fine, involves the department in employing considerable extra staff. The best solution is to have just enough staff that most abuse is forestalled, and that only deliberate offenders are fined.
The car park ticket machines produced data about each ticket issued. By analysing the Car Park machines data it was possible to build up a graphical representation of the numbers of cars staying in the car parks, their arrival times and duration of stay. This was the basic workload and could be translated into staffing numbers per hour. The staffing numbers were plotted graphically to produce the shifts, their start, finish and elapse times. The shift roster was set up to give the number of staff required at all times and produced on a yearly basis which included annual holidays.
This showed that of the current 6 patrol staff in the department, 4 staff could cover the workload satisfactorily, leaving 2 staff available for other duties. The staff could now take on extra duties, including maintenance of the car park machines, a primary source for excuses was that they weren't working, and administration, dealing with the consequences of their activities.
Several staff rosters were investigated to determine which was the best option. These included using shifts of different lengths and having different rosters for seasonal variations in workload. Heavier than usual workloads were expected when shops stayed open later for 'late-night' shopping one day per week, and at Christmas time.
The final stage of the project was to show the results to the staff and take on board their suggestions.
Alec Jezewski
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Tel: (00 44) 1636 816466 email: alec@visualrota.co.uk
CDT website: www.visualrota.co.uk