Designing an annual leave scheduling policy: Case of a financial center

Abstract

Providing annual leave entitlements for employees can help alleviate 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 develop realistic vacation scheduling policies and investigate how they compare from both the employer and the employees' perspectives. Among those policies, 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 formulated and solved under various settings for workload distribution over time, substitution and unit of time for vacations. We use three performance measures 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. Attractive 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.