A few weeks back, MIT published on its Sloan Management web site an interview with Alex Kowalski, a doctoral candidate at MIT Sloan’s Institute for Work and Employment Research, who has been studying jobs in warehousing for several years.
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Kowalski is now involved in a research project with two MIT Sloan professors to see if these DC jobs can be improved in ways that benefit both companies and employees.
Kowalski answer a series of questions on this topic from writer Martha Mangelsdorf – below are some highlights.
He first cited some previous research, based on interviews with a number of warehouse workers. From those interviews, “I learned that what bothered them most was their schedules: How volatile their hours were and how hard that made their life outside of work.”
While full-time warehouse workers can count on their 40-hours for a week, Kowalski said that warehouse workers’ scheduling issues arise because they don't know when they're going to go home each day - in part from ecommerce orders that keep coming in and need to be shipped that day – and face frequent mandatory overtime.
“One thing that was clear in my interviews was that unstable, unpredictable schedules have real costs to people's personal lives,” Kowalski added, noting that “They weigh on people's relationships and make it hard to form new ones. And they also lead to physical exhaustion that creates secondary problems. I've heard about car crashes. I've heard about leaving children at daycare past their pick-up time.”
What can be done? Well, that’s what his next round of research will head. But at a basic level, one answer, Kowalski says, is job rotation, meaning workers in other areas of a DC may be able to come and do picking and shipping to get that total work that must ship done faster.
The more new age approach, Kowalski says, would be giving DC workers more control over when they work, creating for example a mobile app from which workers are able to either bid on the overtime available or to pre-plan days when they won’t work overtime.
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 “This could extend all the way to helping set schedules in advance or to shift swapping,” Kowalski says.
The researcher also believes companies need to get more input from workers relative to new automated system designs in a DC.
SCDigest looks forward to seeing the research when complete.
Any reaction to Kowalski's thoughts or coming research? Let us know your thoughts at the Feedback section below.
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