Obviously, all people must play a role in order to protect families, workers, and society at large. Currently, national administrations are authorising a gradual resumption of work activities. Several nations adopted restrictions, such as suspension of non-essential activities and a substantial proportion of workers is continued to work from home. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been several measures to fight the spread of the disease. It has spread quickly all over the world causing a large number of deaths (the official data reported by the World Health Organization are: 235 countries, areas or territories with cases 40.114.293 confirmed positive cases 1 114 692 deaths. The Corona Virus Disease 2019 is a new coronavirus first identified in Wuhan City, China, in January 2020. In addition, the non-cyclic workforce policy, based on the proposed workday organization, is preferred by employees, since it allows them to better meet their needs. The computational experiments show good performance and underline the potentiality of the model to handle worker safety requirements and practicalities and to ensure work activities continuity. The model has been tested on real data provided by the Department of Mechanical, Energy and Management Engineering, University of Calabria, Italy. In order to improve employees’ satisfaction and ensure the best work/life balance possible, an alternative partition of a workday into shifts to the usual two shifts, morning and afternoon, is proposed. The last optimization model, which can be viewed as the most general and the most flexible formulation, has been developed to capture the specificity of a real case study of an Italian University. It is precisely considering the anti-Covid-19 measures that the models allow to define the working mode to be assigned to the employees: working remotely or on-site. The emphasis is on novel optimization models that take into account demand requirements, employees’ personal and family responsibilities, and anti-Covid-19 measures at the same time. The adoption of precautionary measures to prevent the pandemic from spreading has raised the need to rethink quickly and effectively the way in which the workforce is scheduled, to ensure that all the activities are conducted in a safe and responsible manner. In this paper, we propose optimization models to address flexible staff scheduling problems and some main issues arising from efficient workforce management during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Employee scheduling pdf