Economists assume the market to be free of transaction
costs, although they are evident in organizations and their systems of management.
Interestingly, management is also one of the better methods to address
transaction costs.
I am going to talk a little bit about my work experience in
my current job and its organizational structure. I work as a University Dining
Student Employment Assistant, where I work with the Dining Student Program Coordinator to maintain adequate staffing for
all the dining facilities and services on campus. This includes a work force of
about
1,300 student workers for 6 Dining Halls, 5 a la carte locations, the
catering department, production kitchen, and the Illini Union Ballroom. In class,
we used the University as an example for topics like management hierarchies and
cost-benefit analysis. My role is just another piece in a very long chain of
command for University Housing. Fortunately, I work in the same office as my
boss, so communication is always efficient and transaction costs are typically small
in the office.
Now in my 7th Semester working for Housing- Dining
Services, and my 4th semester in my current position, I have been
around for some big changes. Two and a half years ago, we decided to transition
to using an online system for scheduling and another system for hiring. Everything
had always been done on pen and paper before this. I honestly could not imagine
my job now without the systems we use. In fact, this transition was the reason
the dining department was prompted to create my role along with my boss’s
position.
The two online systems that we use are very different from each
other. The Housing Employment System (HES)
was created by someone in Housing IT. The scheduling system is a third-party
service from WhentoWork.com (W2W) that we pay to use. Overall, the two systems
have saved countless hours of work. Although when comparing them, W2W has by
far higher transaction costs than HES. For example, if we come across a problem
with something in HES, we simply call up the IT guy and they fix it as soon as
possible. They can even make any changes that we recommend to continue
improving the system. However, Whentowork.com often takes a few days to respond
to any issues that arise and sometimes a few more days to fix the problem. Here
we see the direct cost benefits of creating and using a system for our services
as opposed to the hold ups and high transaction costs from a third-party
company.
Another student also wrote about working in Dining Services at one of the residents. Your post is a good complement to that in it gives some sense of the scale of the activity. If, as you suggest, the scheduling comes out of your office, that is indeed a very large undertaking.
ReplyDeleteHowever, you may recall our discussion of decentralization and boots on the ground. Why doesn't each dining hall do its own scheduling. Further, to help me understand things better, would scheduling a typical week be sufficient, and then have all other weeks with pretty much the same schedule? Or is there some reason to have more variation than that?
You then might have talked about the issues that come up with scheduling. I'm sure some of that is that an employee has to miss a shift for whatever reason. In that case backup is needed. Managing that, I assume, is a big part of the issue. Are there other big deal issues that need to be confronted?
I can envision that one of those is when demand at one location is much greater than anticipated. Are staff moved to that location to handle the load? Do places ever run out of food because of excess demand? In any event, what I would have liked to see in this piece is something about the issues that the scheduling addresses. In this piece, it really wasn't there.