Employee positioning and workload allocation

Assigning tasks to employees is a difficult task. Errors committed in such assignments can have far-reaching consequences, such as reduced efficiency due to absenteeism, lack of job satisfaction, formal grievances, and generally deteriorating labor relations. This paper approaches the problem from a spatial point of view. First, the employees and the relevant tasks are mapped in a skill space. After feasible task assignments are determined, tasks are assigned to employees so as to minimize employee-task distances in order to avoid boredom, and minimize disequity between the individual employees' workloads, and minimize costs. Computational results are provided for an engineering department of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, Chile. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.