Internal staff reshuffle - quick, clever, profitable

With regard to capacity fluctuations in general, Mr Roth tells us in the interview that these are a challenge at Arnold AG too. «Depending on the area you sometimes have more and sometimes fewer employees, and then it also depends on the time of year. At the beginning of the year utilisation is always low and towards the middle of the year it is actually always overloaded. It really is a challenge.»

As one way of offsetting these fluctuations, Mr Roth mentions shifting projects. They try as far as possible to plan so that a site project takes place when there is less work - but often, of course, the project schedule is fixed and cannot be changed. Mr Roth also talks about ways of balancing things through staff deployment. «In some departments, such as the telecom department, we do have temporary staff. But of course we always look internally first, to keep our own people occupied and to have employees support each other across locations. Since we started using Vanillaplan we represent all our locations in it, so that you can see quite quickly where there is an overload and where there is not, and can then assign people to projects across locations. You then have the opportunity to see where there is still capacity and where there is an overload.»

When we asked how the internal exchange of employees is organised in detail, he told us: « The employees see their place of work in the Vanillaplan app and we also hold weekly meetings with brief updates. If an employee then has to travel further afield, we inform them about it in good time in advance. And in any case it is in our general terms of employment that we operate throughout Switzerland. With us, hotels and overnight stays are also included, so employees do not have to pay anything. I would say anything about an hour or an hour and a half's travelling time away we accept, but for anything further away they also stay overnight there.»
He also adds that care is taken not to send those with families to more distant locations too often. «The younger ones, who do not yet have a family, are happy to go a bit further afield now and then. Just last week I had a fitter in Valais for a week. Yes, they actually rather enjoy it.»

Finally we were interested in exactly where Mr Roth sees the advantages of internal staff exchange over the temporary staff mentioned at the outset. «Well, with internal exchange the advantage is certainly that we can keep our own people occupied and that the employees then also have the appropriate training. In our sector a basic electrical engineering training is essential, you have to be somewhat familiar with this field. That is why you cannot simply bring in any temporary workers, they do have to come a bit from the sector. Besides, it is always difficult when temporary staff start with us, because we first have to induct them, they have to understand the processes and so on. That is why we actually have few temporary staff. But in civil engineering or telecom it is certainly possible, and those are also the departments where we have them most often.»

We would like to thank Mr Roth very much for the fascinating interview, which gave us interesting insights into the organisation of internal staff exchange.