Behavior Aware Service Staffing

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Cho, David D.; Bretthauer, Kurt M.; Cattani, Kyle D.; Mills, Alex F.
• 署名单位: Woodbury University; Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington; IU Kelley School of Business; City University of New York (CUNY) System; Baruch College (CUNY)
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1111/poms.12988
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 1285-1304
• 关键词: nurse; Hospitals; outcomes; systems; ratios; IMPACT; care; 1st

摘要

Empirical studies of service systems have shown that workers exhibit different service rates depending on their assigned workload. In contrast, staffing models typically assume a constant service rate. To address this issue, we model two commonly observed behavioral effects, speedup and slowdown, in a general way that allows us to study their joint impact on service staffing. We fit our behavioral model to a hospital dataset and show that both effects are present across a variety of departments. Given these findings, we incorporate speedup and slowdown behavior into a multiperiod workforce staffing model and show that a workload (defined as the number of jobs assigned to each worker) that maximizes the service rate is typically not optimal. As expected, the effectiveness of the widely practiced single-ratio workload staffing policy depends on the strength of the speedup and slowdown effects. Interestingly, we find that in the presence of slowdown, weak behavioral effects (where workers work at a relatively constant rate) are the cases where the single-ratio policy performs the worst; the optimal workload instead varies the most as system demand changes. This result differs from practice in many services such as healthcare, where fixed patient-to-nurse ratio workloads are commonly used. We show that the strength of behavioral effects modulates the trade-off between a steady workload and the number of schedule adjustments.