Professor’s formula makes COVID-19 work scheduling easier

As COVID-19 restrictions ease around the country and more workers head back to the office, hybrid schedules blending at-home days and at-work days may be a short-term solution — presuming that a business has not been scheduling that way all along.

Balancing the needs of the office with health concerns and workers’ preferences can be tricky, but Distinguished Service Professor Daryl Santos has it worked out to a formula.

Santos — a faculty member in the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, as well as Binghamton University’s vice provost for diversity and inclusiveness — recently published his solution in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Review. The journal is published quarterly by the Society for Industrial and Systems Engineering (SISE), and Santos serves as editor.

“A Mathematical Model for In-Person Office Assignment During COVID-19” began last year as a question from Santos’ brother, who manages a team of insurance employees in Texas.

“They have a lot of employees in a relatively smallish space – it’s not tiny, but more than COVID rules allow to stay 6 feet apart,” Santos said. “His boss told him, ‘We need to develop rotation schedules. Some of you will work from home, some of you will work in the office, but not all of you can work from home because we still have people coming to the office for our services.’”

The employees were in two groups, coordinators and assistants, with a certain number of each group needed in the office at all times. The schedule covered a two-week (10-day) window and allowed employees to choose to work from home every other Monday or every other Friday, which was a perk that was in existence prior to COVID.

“It’s basically a juggling act to try to figure out these schedules,” Santos said.

To find a solution, he plugged the variables into a program that optimized everyone’s preferences, and he overcame a hole in the schedule when one employee agreed to work an extra day in the office more than the others.

Santos said that a manager eventually could have come up with a similar schedule using what mathematicians might call a “brute force and ignorance approach,” but it would have taken longer and been more frustrating.

When he presented this paper at a conference last fall, Santos got interest from government subcontractors and other employers who face similar scheduling issues, some of them separate from the pandemic.

“Companies are talking about downsizing their bricks-and-mortar locations,” he said. “Maybe they don’t need big office spaces if more people work from home, so they’re looking to reduce their footprint.”

At his brother’s company, the schedule Santos created has continued to work well more than a year later.

“He definitely got bragging rights, because we got it solved for him in a day or two,” he said with a laugh. “The other two managers said, ‘What the what?’”

ASQ award

This spring, the Binghamton section of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) honored Santos with the Paul A. Robert Award for “outstanding commitment” to supporting local businesses and organizations in promoting product and service quality.

In 1947, Robert founded a local group to preserve and propagate knowledge learned by the military during World War II. The group became the Binghamton section of the American Society for Quality, and it established the award in 1965.

Santos was hailed for initiating an ASQ student branch at Binghamton University and serving as faculty advisor from 1996 to 2004, as well as his many published papers, the “Quality Day” conferences he co-organized on campus, and his work with the Watson Institute for Systems Excellence (WISE) and the Industrial and Systems Engineering Review.

“Dr. Santos has been a major contributor to the field of quality, extending his passion for this subject matter to his students and encouraging their participation in this area for many years,” said Mohammad Khasawneh, professor and chair of the SSIE Department. “His ongoing mentorship and efforts to share knowledge with others interested in quality speak to the heart of this award, and we are delighted he was selected.”

Santos said he was surprised by the award but is proud of the contributions he’s made in the field of quality improvement.

“The work of most of my master’s advisees and several of my PhD advisees is in the area of quality, so if you look at all the master’s theses I’ve advised, easily 100 or so are related to quality, process development and process improvement,” he said. “That’s where most of my own research has been, too. Most of what I do with WISE and working with companies is about reliability.”