Individual employees should travel as little as possible. To achieve this goal; attempt to arrange cleaning duties near one other. This is not always possible, however, because of the work load equity goal. Examples:
A) An employee can easily accumulate a full workload with one or two assigned nursing units on a patient floor.
B) An office cleaning assignment may require an employee to cover more territory simply because the production rate for offices can be much higher allowing the employee a larger cleaning area. Thus, that employee may complete an entire floor of offices with a total six-hour work load.
The first principle of equitable work is violated if each of these respective employees are restricted to clean one floor.
To maintain the first principle, requires a compromise in the second principle to a certain degree. Find an hour’s worth of work to be done in an area that is near the original assigned area.
Because these two principles are not always consistent with one another, you will experience a slight variation between work load and the proximity of given areas within assignments.
When assignment changes are proposed, you must keep these two major principles of assignment development in mind. If a given area is added to a certain employee's assignment, recognize that one or two other things must change for this to be a justifiable action. Something else in the assignment may be deleted (area closing down or a production rate change for a given procedure) allowing the time requirement to be reduced. In some instances, production rates increase with a sacrifice to quality levels.