Employee cohorts and staff fluctuation

Feature Roadmap
1

What?

Rather than having a static number of employees that only ever changes when new staff is hired or laid off, the workforce is split into “cohorts”. A cohort will likely correspond to a business period, which in AS is a week. Every week, a new cohort is created, and any new hires in that week will be part of this new cohort. After a certain amount of weeks (probably somewhere between 30 and 40 - think “working life”), more and more members of the oldest cohorts will leave the company due to age, meaning the company needs to re-hire staff to compensate.

There is also a natural continuous fluctuation which might be influenced by staff mood, job market conditions and other factors.

Re-hiring staff doesn’t come for free and requires resources, both in terms of personnel as well as direct costs.

Naturally, as cohorts age, they accumulate “experience”, which might be relevant to features like staff training, workforce performance, etc.

Cohorts also have their respective “memory”, meaning a cohort that experienced very bad or very good periods of their airline will “remember” this, which might be relevant to other features (staff mood, worker representation or similar). At the same time, such cohorts phasing out might have positive or negative effect on the workforce as a whole.

Why?

The key appeal of this feature by itself stems from the fact that it very naturally creates a handicap for older, larger airlines. As cohorts grow older, the need to re-hire staff increases relative to the existing workforce, increasing HR costs. It also creates inertia, as certain initiatives might require “convincing old cohorts”.

But besides this, this is first and foremost intended as a foundational feature for a whole array of other, more or less advanced HR-related features that can benefit in one way or another from a cohort-based model.

When?

This should be tackled fairly soon, at least in a basic version, as the current HR-part of the game is really old and probably the part of the game with the most bug reports on file (let’s not even talk about the awful user experience it provides). As such, this should likely be added with or shortly after Project “Glow-Up” (UI refresh).

2

Would company loyalty, through good working practices & fair pay also be a factor when determining the turnover rate?

The other thing would be as to whether different jobs may face different levels of staff turnover. For instance employees assigned to check-in or cabin crew are more likely to move around job wise as a natural step of progression compared to say pilots. Who would naturally stay longer in a stable environment.

I would also wonder whether pilots trained by the airline may also have a higher loyalty to the airline compared to fresh hires off the market?

It does sound like a fair idea though, overall I think it would just be a matter of getting the rotation to feel natural enough :slight_smile:

1 Like
3

Yes, company loyalty will definitely be a thing, either as a function of general “staff mood” or as a dedicated parameter that develops per cohort (and/or job type). As such, everything you mentioned should be doable.

1 Like
4

I think you might want to also include pilot upgrades, e.g., copilot → captain, type rating, etc., and if the upgrade opportunity exists, including across the companies in the same holding, they will have a lower chance of leaving the company/holding. I think this is important as training someone new would be more costly than upgrading a pilot in the same company. Obviously, this will also be linked to how much the company is willing to spend on upgrade training.

1 Like
5

Therefore, I think it’ll be a good change

1 Like
6

One game that implemented staff’s language skills, base and Nationality is Avoisim. This encourages players to expand according to the staff available, rather than wherever they want
BTW, is staff’s homesickness planned in any way, shape or form, @martin ?

7

Definitely have those in mind as well, although for some reason I intended to add them to the worker representation feature, where things like seniority play a role. But now that I type it out, this might be a related but different topic.

Not sure about whether this level of detail is required and what would be required to make it work. You mean when workers are permanently employed at a base far from their home?

1 Like
8

I mean when workers are working for an extended period of time with no visit at home

9

This sounds like something that would be part of crew rotations, but there I don’t know what level of detail we can or will go down to.

10

I think implementing home sickness will be going too far TBH