Antoaneta Törner

Service companies often adopt on‐demand scheduling to balance labor costs and fluctuating market demand. However, research shows that such practices can reduce worker productivity and retention. In this study, we examine how on‐demand scheduling affects two critical outcomes: worker absenteeism and patient dissatisfaction. We extend the conceptualization of undesirable scheduling by introducing schedule discontinuity —the presence of unpaid interruptions within a worker's daily schedule—alongside the more commonly studied schedule inconsistency , or variability in work hours across weeks. Using data on 1.2 million home care visits in a Canadian healthcare provider, we find that both schedule inconsistency and discontinuity significantly increase absenteeism and patient dissatisfaction. Specifically, moving from the 25th to 75th percentile in discontinuity (inconsistency) raises absenteeism by 20.00% (19.29%), and customer complaints by 27.33% (40.27%). To assess the practical implications for employers, we formulate and solve a schedule optimization problem that minimizes schedule discontinuity (or inconsistency), while satisfying demand and supply constraints. Applying a machine learning predictive model to these optimized schedules, we estimate reductions in the probability of absenteeism by 9.5% (8.2%) and in the probability of patient complaints by 7.7% (2.3%), demonstrating that modest scheduling adjustments can substantially improve worker and service outcomes.

We investigate the effect of frontloading on project financial performance. Frontloading refers to the practice of concentrating project members’ efforts, on the execution of concurrent tasks, towards the beginning of the project, so that errors are avoided in the earlier stages, avoiding the costly need for rework in later stages. However, not always companies can frontload a project, especially when the concurrent execution of multiple interdependent tasks generates excessive complexity in the early stages. Companies hence face a conundrum when they cannot afford the costs of complexity associated with front-loading, but yet need to reduce the risk of discovering costly mistakes too close to project completion. Building on the literature on project teams, we develop hypotheses to conceptualize how companies can ensure high project performance when low levels of frontloading need to be applied. We test our hypotheses using a proprietary dataset of 413 projects of a high-tech European firm. We find that the positive effect of frontloading is attenuated when team leader, team, or client familiarity is high as the different facets of familiarity allow teams to be better at collaborating and anticipating errors at the beginning of the projects, compared to less familiar teams. The practical and theoretical implication of these moderation effects is that when project managers need to keep frontloading low, project performance can be increased by ensuring that the project team has high team leader, internal and client familiarity. More generally, our findings shed light on the effect of frontloading on project performance—a question that is to date unanswered by empirical research.

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) are of vital importance for organizations that wish to nurture a culture of equality. Despite a growing research interest, especially in the firm-level performance effect of diversity in top management teams, there is scant research on how bio-demographic D&I measures impact team-level operational outcomes of work teams. This study examines how the inclusion of women and older employees affects the performance of sales teams of telecommunication technology. We focus on these two aspects of D&I, as gender discrimination and ageism are prevalent in the technology sector. To test our hypotheses, we use a panel dataset of 260 sales teams. We account for the endogeneity of assigning members to the teams and the dynamic panel bias by estimating our model with the system generalized methods of moments (S-GMM) approach. The results suggest that greater inclusion of women and older employees is associated with increased sales performance, even for teams in the technology sector that inhabit a fast-paced environment. These findings are robust to alternative model specifications, as well as alternative operationalizations of the inclusion of women and older employees. Taken together, this study corroborates the business case of promoting the greater inclusion of women and older employees in the technology sector.

Problem definition: We investigate the effect of using subcontracted workers together with permanent workers on project financial performance. Academic/practical relevance: It is widespread practice, across disparate businesses, to staff project teams with subcontracted workers-and yet, despite the prevalence of this phenomenon, there is scant research on how subcontracted workers impact project performance. Investigating such an effect is important because past findings on the effects of subcontracting in retail or assembly lines cannot be hastily extrapolated to the more qualified workers and more demanding tasks normally associated with project environments. Methodology: Building on previous findings about the higher motivation level of subcontracted versus permanent workers when the latter are protected from individual dismissal by the law, we develop hypotheses to conceptualize how and under what conditions subcontracted workers positively impact project performance. We then test our hypotheses by analyzing 413 projects of a European high-tech firm. Results: We find that with increased use of subcontracted workers comes increased project profit margins. This positive effect is stronger for larger teams and weaker when large project scope changes occur or when higher-skilled workers are subcontracted. We also find this effect to be stronger when subcontracted workers are involved in technical rather than administrative roles and when subcontractors join in the later stages of the project. Managerial implications: This study offers guidelines on how project managers can use subcontracting to increase project margins, highlighting strategic and tactical factors that affect the benefits of using subcontracted labor.