Larry Jewell

On rare occasions does one find a truly original idea. Gilbert Tanner, chief of the chemistry section of the pathology laboratory at Latter Day Saints Hospital in Salt Lake City, had just such an idea. On January 7th of this year, the 10 person chem lab staff began a 26 week per year work schedule. The system consists of working one seven day week of 10 hours per day followed by seven days off. What triggered such an idea? I guess you would say the idea came to me because I am rather lazy and resented the fact that so much of my time was tied up in scheduling people for weekends, holidays and vacation periods. I just had to do something to get out of doing this much work. What problems are there with salaries? There was a little conflict with the salary because the people were now working 70 hours every two weeks instead of 80. We alleviated this by suggesting that no vacations and no holidays be used for part of this 260 hours that they were being paid for which they were not working. This left approximately 100 hours difference still. And so the idea came about that these people, the employees, would take care of any sick leave or absenteeism by being called 10 days a year to cover this contingency. It should be noted that no absenteeism has occurred since the schedule was initiated. But what about the quantity and quality of the work produced? Most people, when you first talk to them about this, bring up this question right at the start of any conversation and they all expect you to say that the people get excessively tired and that the work is not as good. But our experience has proved that the work, both quantity wise and quality wise, has improved considerably. Our output has increased about 12% and the quality of our work has increased perceptibly and appreciably. I presume you do have quality controls, measurement of quality in your work. Yes, we do. And this is a good way we can tell. We use coefficient of variation type thing on each test that we do and we find that this coefficient is dropping quite perceptibly. Further Investigation discovered that 9,000 units of work were produced in the 30 days preceding the new schedule, while 11,000 units of work were produced during the first 30 days of the new schedule. But what about employee attitudes? People are much more businesslike now. Under our old schedule, we had to have some extra people around in order to cover for weekends. As noted by the fact that we cover now with five people what we used to cover with 10. The people realize that they have more work to do now. Consequently, they organize their work better. People were griping a little bit simply because they had nothing else to do. So now that they have something to do, why, the griping has diminished considerably. And finally, from the administrator's point of view, what has it cost the hospital? Because of the fact that we don't have to hire people part time to cover weekends, that we don't have to have overtime work to cover weekends, we figure we can save the department about $6,000 a year. How do the employees view the new setup? When asked about the schedule, technologist Rhonda Gillenwater replied, there aren't so many people around you hassling you. You have a definite bench and you work on it, and it gives you more concentration, especially for spending with the students. You have more definite time, specific time to work with each one of your students. Of course, who doesn't get tired on Fridays, even without having to work Saturday and Sunday. But then you have a whole week to rest up from it. Where before you only had two days and that was spent. Saturday was spent cleaning house and Sunday going to church, and you had to work Monday morning. Another technologist, Ann Shirley, replied, I like working harder while I'm here at work, keeping busy all day, whereas before, sometimes we had a lot of free time. But the more you have to do, usually the easier it is to organize. What about the lack of time for major vacations? I'd rather take three or four little short vacations because I like to go on short trips and go home more often. It must be noted that there has been one major problem in the plan, a lack of correlation between the alternating teams. To solve this, Chief Tanner has kept himself on a schedule of five days a week, every week. Chief Tanner, does the staff really like your idea? The people, if they're honest with me, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise, say that this is a real great idea, and they like it very much. This is Larry Jewell for National Public Radio in Salt Lake City, Utah.