Worker assignment models for hiring people with disabilities in service organizations

Abstract

A diverse workforce is one of the most important assets for modern organizations. In this sense, the integration of workers with disabilities is both an opportunity in terms of staff diversity and of corporate social responsibility, and, in many cases, a legal duty. Successfully achieving this integration can nevertheless be challenging, and requires taking into account different aspects, one of them is achieving a fair and efficient task distribution.

In the literature, many task assignment models have been proposed for distributing and managing tasks within a work team, usually aiming to optimize productivity and efficiency. These models take into account workers abilities, experience and work charge, as well as the characteristics of the tasks, in order to assign each worker the most appropriate task. When the workforce includes people with disabilities, the assignment models must be adaptable enough to guarantee the full integration of all the team members.

In this paper we develop a mathematical programming model for task assignment in the context of hiring people with disabilities in service organizations. We discuss a practical case study at the Intendencia de Montevideo (IdeM), as part of a project for improving the integration of people with disabilities in its staff (currently the IdeM staff only includes about 1.5% of employees with disabilities; while applicable laws state that this percentage should raise to at least 4%).
The mathematical programming model developed includes four alternative objective functions, taking into account the goals of different stakeholders. We analyze the solutions found by applying the model, comparing the results against manual assignments; we discuss them when the objective functions are integrated using a weighted sum method, and the sensitivity with regard to the coefficients; and how the results vary when the number of available positions is changed. The main conclusion is that mathematical programming models are an effective tool to support decision making and improve the integration of workers with disabilities in a service organization.