The "Three Circles" represent the three key elements required to design the best schedule successfully. These elements also reflect Coleman Consulting Groups definition of a schedule:
Business Needs - "a system for deploying capital and personnel."
Employee Desires - "with employee buy-in."
Health & Safety - "specific work, pay, and coverage policies."
Our consultants are experts in the field of scheduling and resource optimization. They work across multiple industries to identify best practices from one industry that may have broader applications to all industries. As part of the Business Needs, our consultants learn how you communicate and conduct your day-to-day business so that we can know how best to approach you and your employees with ways to improve or change your system.
Understanding Employee Desires is just as important as understanding the Business Needs. You can build the best schedules that meet all of your business requirements but create an atmosphere of increased absenteeism, turnover, and low morale if those schedules do not compliment employee’s lifestyles. When you have employee buy-in, understand the factors that drive them, and take them into consideration, you have the most excellent chance for success. Remember, many, many desires fit within the circle, but only a few fits inside overlap of the Employee Desires and Business Needs circles.
The Health & Safety circle is something that Coleman Consulting Group brings to the table. Health & Safety is about understanding fatigue factors such as shift rotation and rate of rotation, time off between stretches of work, and the impact of different schedules on Circadian Rhythms. Do you know that even fixed night shift employees are subjected to shift rotation? Social and family pressures employees can cause them to sacrifice sleep in favor of their personal obligations and commitments. Our company was founded on understanding these factors and designing schedules that help mitigate their impact.
Carefully blending the needs of the business with employee desires and health & safety, Coleman Consulting Group is able to work with managers and supervisors to deploy a schedule that alleviates many of the problems businesses face today while increasing their profits.