Businesses needing to make a quick turnaround on their bottom lines generally turn to one thing first: staff reductions.
The math seems to work. Payroll is generally a company’s largest expense and chipping away at the labor force should immediately reduce costs. But that’s not always the case.
Unless the workload changes along with the staff reduction, headcount reductions often end up costing organizations much more in the long run. Unbalanced staffing levels are actually a key contributor to increased costs, fatigue and human error in shift work operations, according to Dr. Martin Moore-Ede and William Sirois, Two of the world’s leading experts in shiftwork and fatigue risk management.
According to CIRCADIAN’s new complimentary whitepaper, “Staffing Levels : A Key to Managing Risk in 24/7 Operations”, Moore-Ede and Sirois say 20 percent of the industrialized workforce are shiftworkers.
By analyzing data from hundreds of round-the-clock operations, CIRCADIAN has shown that a significant imbalance between workload and staffing levels drives up costs of overtime, absenteeism and staff turnover.
“Staffing is the first key step in engineering fatigue out of your business,” says Moore-Ede, CEO of CIRCADIAN and former Harvard Medical School professor, “and other fatigue management measures such as shift scheduling and training programs will fail if you don’t balance staffing and workload.”
CIRCADIAN’s whitepaper examines overtime levels in North American businesses, and shows how costs can be weeded out of shift work operations by addressing staffing and scheduling imbalances.
CIRCADIAN is a fatigue risk management solutions provider for the 24/7 workforce for businesses that operate around the clock.
