Integrating physiological and mental aspects in employee scheduling: an overview for practitioners in production management

Abstract

Production companies are facing increasing production complexity and demographic change. Therefore, with its decreasing physiological and mental performance prerequisites, the aging workforce is often confronted with overload at the workplace leading to fatigue and work errors in the short term and increasing sick days in the long term. Integrating physiological and mental aspects into existing employee scheduling is one way to maintain employees’ health and performance. Incorporating these aspects is often very complex due to the need for multiple disciplines and the lack of supporting methods and tools. Therefore, this paper provides a practical-oriented overview for including physiological and mental aspects in existing employee scheduling. The intercorrelation between workload, individual performance prerequisites and strain, their measurement methods, and standardised alternatives are explained to support industrial practitioners in production management, like planners. A four-step method for integrating physiological and mental aspects in employee scheduling is presented. With the help of this method, the interaction between the ergonomics/human factors departments and production management can be improved, resulting in a more human-oriented employee scheduling. A practical example from manual assembly illustrates the application of the presented approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Physiological aspects
• mental aspects
• manual assembly
• employee scheduling
• employee health

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Tropschuh

M.Sc. Barbara Tropschuh has been a research associate at the Institute of Machine Tools and Industrial Management (iwb) at the Technical University of Munich since 2018 and previously studied mechanical engineering with a focus on production management and logistics at the Technical University of Munich.

Julien Cegarra

Prof. Julien Cegarra is full professor in the Department of Psychology at INU Champollion, France, and director of the Science of Cognition, Technology, and Ergonomics (ScoTE) Lab in Albi, France. He received his PhD in ergonomics from the University of Paris 8 in France in 2004.

Olga Battaïa

Prof. Olga Battaïa has a Full Professor position in Department of Operations Management and Information Systems at Kedge Business School. She obtained her PhD form the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne in France in 2007, for which she was granted the Best PhD Thesis Award by the French Research Cluster on Modelling, Analysis and Management of Dynamic Systems. She serves as Associated Editor for several international peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Manufacturing Systems, IISE Transactions and Omega-the International Journal of Management Science. She is also a Member of IFAC Technical Committee 5.2. Manufacturing Modelling for Management and Control. Her research interests lie in the domains of Supply Chain Management, Sustainable manufacturing, Operations Research, Combinatorial optimisation, Decision Support Systems. Olga Battaïa co-authored more than 200 scientific publications, participated in several European research projects and was involved in organising several renowned international conferences across Europe and other countries.