Staffing and allocation of workers in an administrative office

The world of work is increasingly characterized by processing of records, forms, or cases. This processing is usually organized as a set of interdependent tasks within an administrative office. A major issue facing such administrative offices is how they should be organized to maximize productivity when short-term reassignment of workers is difficult, costly, or severely restricted. The present work grew out of a study conducted at a County Assistance Office in Western Pennsylvania and addresses three important productivity questions in organizational productivity: (1) How should a given number of workers be allocated across related tasks, (2) will the arrangement that seems best for productivity increase or decrease equity within the office, and (3) what is the optimal size of an office? To answer question 1, we model the administrative office as a closed queueing network. Thus modeled, the problem has an optimal allocation of workers, and we propose an efficient method for finding it. In response to question 2, we show (1) that for offices of a fixed size, the allocation of workers that maximizes throughput also maximizes equity, and (2) that across offices of different sizes, throughput per worker is not monotonically related to equity. Changes in the size of the office that improve productivity may have lower equity; conversely, changes in the size of the office that improve equity may have lower productivity. Finally, in response to question 3, we show that the previous results can be used to determine the optimal office size in terms of throughput. This result has relevance for situations in which there are multiple offices of the same type. To the extent that worker satisfaction is related to equity, these results imply that managers may have to choose between worker satisfaction and output in setting the size of the office, but for offices of a fixed size, the allocation that maximizes output will also maximize worker satisfaction.