OUR
EMPLOYEE SCHEDULING JOURNEY
By Andrew Blackwood - EMS Sergeant - Queen Anne’s County DES EMS - Centerville, MD Photos: Mark Odell
www.OdellPhotos.com
Here at Queen Anne’s County DES EMS in Centreville, Maryland we used spreadsheets to manage our employee scheduling for many years. The spread‐ sheets were located on a desktop com‐ puter at headquarters and members would either have to stop by the sta‐ tion or call‐in to find out when and where they were working. The system worked, but there were two constant challenges ‐ it took a lot of labor to maintain the schedule AND it was diffi‐ cult to keep everyone looking at the current version. We have full‐time people on rota‐ tions and we use part‐time people to fill in for vacationing employees and spe‐ cial events. Scheduling the rotations for the full‐time people wasn’t a big deal until someone called in sick, or wanted vacation, or wanted to sign‐up for overtime ‐ then it got tricky. Throw in the juggling of career staff and avail‐ ability‐based part‐timers and schedul‐ ing could quickly become a nightmare. It seemed that no sooner was a schedule created than it was being changed. When we printed it to hand out to employees, sometimes the ink wouldn’t even be dry before a change had been made and the previous ver‐ sion was out of date. Our “master schedule” would often be covered in so much whiteout that it felt like card‐ stock. We tried uploading PDFs of the schedule to a file‐sharing website but it was always a struggle to keep the data current. Dealing with scheduling relat‐ ed emails and phone calls had become a full‐time job and it was starting to feel like there was no solution in sight. Our department was 12 career staff in 2003 and 41 by the summer of 2007.
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