Designing an Annual Leave Scheduling Policy: Case of a Financial Center

Abstract

Providing annual leave entitlements for employees can help allevi-ate burnout since paid-time off work directly affects the health and productivity of workers as well as the quality of the service provided. In this paper, we de-velop realistic vacation scheduling policies and investigate how they compare from both the employer and the employees' perspectives. Among those poli-cies, we consider one that is used in practice, another that we propose as a compromise which performs very well in most cases, and one that is similar to machine scheduling for benchmarking. Integer programming models are for-mulated and solved under various settings for workload distribution over time, substitution and unit of time for vacations. We use three performance mea-sures for comparisons: penalty cost of unused vacation days, percent vacation granted and level of employee satisfaction. We provide a real-life case study at a bank's financial center. Numerical results suggest that an all-or-nothing type of vacation policy performs economically worse than the others. Attrac-tive annual leave scheduling policies can be designed by administering vacation schedules daily rather than weekly, ensuring full cover for off-duty employees, and offering employees some degree of choice over vacation schedules.