Short Work Schedules

What would you do, when you don't have sufficient work to keep everyone busy for a full day. This poses certain problem on decision making about what best can be done in such situations. Do you cut work hours for all? Or lay off some men and keep others on regular hours? Or do you pay all equally, even if they don't work, as they don't have work to do? Of course, the answers may be written into the labour contracts but it is quite a brain teasing and difficult problem too to schedule the jobs in line with the decisions of top management.

Usually, in job work, it is customary to let differing workloads work themselves out. But in maintenance jobs it is not so easy to take such decision. If there is enough work for some people which could be finished in five or six hours a day, everybody will fight for such work only and nobody will choose the work that takes longer duration or difficult. This inequality and unevenness of jobs, but inevitable in maintenance throws the foremen in hell of the human relation problems in his day to day work.

Therefore, in scheduling such jobs a lot of attention is to be paid towards the load for the week as well as for the day. If you are likely to have thirty two hours of work for a week, it is probably better way to work five short days (five or six hours) instead of four full days to keep some flexibility for emergency jobs. Sometimes it is necessary to pay the attention to the need for full work crews. Perhaps we find this commonly in Preventive maintenance scheduling and are less common in Breakdown maintenance.

Merits

• Good human relations.
• The policy motivates workmen to complete the job early (to go early). Thus, the jobs get finished faster.
• Flexibility in work schedules.
• Works will be done at faster pace.
• It provides scope for Job rotation and hence job satisfaction and motivation to the workmen.

Demerits

• Some workers may do hatch-patch work to finish faster.
• Workmen once accustomed to more flexibility cannot easily return to their normal way when needed. This induces additional human relation problems.
• Creates conflicts to between departments particularly, between production and maintenance departments due to difference in their timings of works.
• Urgent works get affected.