The impact of poor rostering practices
An enterprise with 15,000 employees had its frontline staff decimated due to high turnover, secondments and absenteeism.
This left some departments with only 60% of their workforce remaining, with many of these on special arrangements. With more than 50% of the remaining senior staff on flexible or part-time arrangements, the ability to establish teams or cover critical periods was compromised.
Existing roster practices meant the workforce was negatively impacted by the lack of predictability, frequent last-minute changes, inequity of weekends and back shifts worked, multiple quick changes between shift start times, and single rest days with few whole weekends off. These instances were often in breach of Employee Agreement and Fatigue Management guidelines.
Orkest developed a set of rosters to provide essential coverage and predictable work hours for the workforce with regular breaks and weekends off. This also allowed a balance between people in the new standard rosters and those on flexible and part-time work arrangements.
