Abstract for: Multi-Tiered Workforce and Work Complexity Modeling

Organizations often struggle to design and maintain adequate workforce structures to fill capacity requirements. System dynamics provides a mechanism to investigate this situation by modeling the accumulations, flows, and causal relationships in the system. This vein of research yielded several insights and structures to better understand concepts such as the effects of schedule pressure, the capability trap, and rework. However, organizations often contain additional complexities that complicate the previous methods. For example, organizations often contain several different types of workers. These workers may have different capacities but furthermore most likely completely different types of work. Some work, through either training requirements or complexity cannot be completed by every worker. This paper addresses such a situation, building upon previous workforce models, by developing a three-tiered workforce structure that completes two separate types of work by leveraging a dynamic assignment mechanism for workers. This paper also demonstrates how developing flexible parameters can help organizations leverage these simple models to explore both existing and envisioned work environments and their relative effectiveness with different workforce structures. By creating these additional flexible structures organizations address more nuanced workforce questions and anticipate the future effects of workforce policy on both people and work.