Statistics Canada reduces time to create staff Schedules by 50%

Peter Sha, Assistant Director of Operations, Western Region says: ìThe application was very stable and few configuration changes needed to be made once we rolled it out. We were very happy with the way it worked for us. Usability feedback from the managers was positive, which was great considering how long we were doing scheduling the old way. The QHR team was outstanding, flexible and willing to learn from us and our needs.î

COMPANY
The mission of Statistics Canada is to build positive relationships with respondents to collect, compile and publish data. For the Western Region, focus is on the collection of data. Information and publications are provided both for a fee and at no cost.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Because Statistics Canada has grown into a large call center model, the means of efficiently managing the workforce has changed. In addition, the increasing unionization of the workforce added to the complexity of scheduling and had a direct impact on handling human resource issues like grievances.

ìHistorically, information was collected with field workers going door to door. With the change in the publicís privacy sentiment, it was important for us to maintain positive relations with the respondents. People just donít like someone knocking on their door anymoreî, said Peter Sha, Assistant Director of Operations. ìIt was getting too expensive to send people out to do physical data collection. Our large surveys are much easier to do with the technology modelî.

Spreadsheets were the traditional method for scheduling a single call center. ìTypically, it would take three to four Project Supervisors a full week to prepare a schedule in Excel for 80-90 workstations. Today, with 90% of our workers being unionized, the requirement to schedule people according to the rules of collective agreements meant that scheduling efforts and complexity increased dramatically.î

Surveys are conducted with shift workers on the telephone. Topics like health, immigration, labour force trends and what people are buying at the grocery store are examples of information collected.

ìBecause the survey schedules are often created ad-hoc, it created a labour shortage problem for us. This meant we immediately had a need to track availability of workers as well. Too many versions of the schedule were further increasing the workload and all this manual process meant that performance reviews were difficult to complete.î

There was no systematic way to track the history of employee attendance with the Excel system. Excessive paper trails created long delays when defending grievances. Managers were frustrated with the lack of available tools to balance availability, skills for different surveys and union rules.

QHR SOLUTION
ìWe had been looking for a scheduling system for a long time and werenít able to find what we needed ëoff the shelfí. We were looking for ways to get out of our situation when we read an article about QHR Software. Following an evaluation process, we implemented the scheduling application in a couple of pilot programs.î Two pilot surveys were conducted with staff scheduled for business surveys and then for household surveys.

ìThe workload designer feature allowed us to determine how many day or evening shifts we would need based upon our workload requirements. Then we could use those baselines to schedule people based on the rules we had configured in the system and easily put people on the schedule. This made the process so much easier.î

ìThis was a regional initiative for Western Canada and the feedback from the managers was positive, which was great considering how long we were doing scheduling the old way.ì ìWe had many healthy exchanges with the QHR team, but they were outstanding, flexible and willing to learn from our needs and us. This really set them apart.î

Quadrant HR was used to schedule survey staff in half the time, with almost no errors. Integrated attendance history allowed Statistics Canada to manage HR requirements and attendance information for performance reviews. Employee availability was easier to manage and allowed for quick decisions when scheduling changes happened.