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 thissense, the integration of workers with disabilities is both an opportunity in terms of staffdiversity and of corporate social responsibility, and, in many cases, a legal duty. Success-fully achieving this integration can nevertheless be challenging, and requires taking intoaccount different aspects, one of which is achieving a fair and efficient task distribution. In the literature, many task assignment models have been proposed for distributingand managing tasks within a work team, usually aiming to optimize productivity andefficiency. These models take into account workers’ abilities, experience and work charge,as well as the characteristics of the tasks, to assign each worker the most appropriatetask. When the workforce includes people with disabilities, the assignment models mustbe 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 thecontext of hiring people with disabilities in service organizations. We discuss a practicalcase study at the Intendencia de Montevideo (IdeM), as part of a project for improvingthe integration of people with disabilities in its staff (currently, the IdeM staff onlyincludes about 1.5% of employees with disabilities; while applicable laws state that thispercentage should be at least 4%). The mathematical programming model developedincludes four alternative objective functions, taking into account the goals of differentstakeholders. We analyze the solutions found by applying the model, comparing theresults against manual assignments. We also discuss the solutions obtained when theobjective functions are integrated using a weighted sum method, and the sensitivitywith regard to the coefficients. We also study how the results vary when the number ofavailable positions is changed. The main conclusion is that mathematical programmingmodels are an effective tool to support decision making and improve the integration ofworkers with disabilities in a service organization.