Part of the Cities, Municipalities and Local Authorities series
Local authorities are having to manage more and more responsibilities with fewer and fewer employees. At the same time, sickness absences, holidays, part-time work and different qualifications mean that actual staffing levels can look different every day. Anyone who wants to manage their workforce efficiently today therefore needs not only more employees, but above all greater visibility. This is exactly where digital Workforce Management comes in: it shows who is available, which qualifications employees have, where staff are needed and how assignments can be planned effectively.
ZEUS® Staff Scheduling provides transparency regarding employees, availability, qualifications and assignments. Those responsible can quickly identify who is suitable for a particular task or replacement and distribute existing workforce resources more efficiently. This makes personnel scheduling more predictable, even when short-term changes occur.
A short-notice absence can throw an entire duty schedule into disarray. With ZEUS®, available employees, working hours and planned assignments can be viewed centrally. Suitable replacements can therefore be identified and scheduled more quickly. Fewer phone calls, fewer Excel spreadsheets, faster decisions.
Not every employee can take on every assignment. Particularly in municipal maintenance departments, municipal utilities and technical services, qualifications and specialist knowledge play an important role. ZEUS® helps bring availability and qualifications together, allowing employees to be specifically scheduled for suitable assignments.
When staff are in short supply, the existing workforce must not be permanently overloaded. Combining ZEUS® Staff Scheduling with ZEUS® Time and Attendance provides transparency over planned and actual working hours.
This makes it easier to incorporate working time accounts, additional working hours and available capacity into workforce planning.
Municipal employees work under very different conditions. While fixed working hours are common in town halls, municipal maintenance departments and municipal utilities often require shift models, on-call duties or mobile assignments.
ZEUS® Workforce Management maps these different requirements within one shared system landscape.
Municipal maintenance departments, field services and municipal utilities are not tied to a desk. With the ZEUS® mobile App, employees can record their working hours while on the move and remain digitally connected to central processes.
This means Workforce Management also works wherever the workplace changes from day to day.
According to the dbb, around 570,000 employees were missing from the public sector in Germany in 2025. The dbb also expects around 1.4 million employees to leave the public sector due to retirement within the next ten years. This makes for a particularly strong starting point for the topic.
As of 30 June 2024, around 5.38 million people were employed in the public sector in Germany, according to Destatis. Of these, 3.42 million were employees and 1.96 million were civil servants, judges and members of the armed forces.
The number of employees in the public sector increased by 22.1% between 2014 and 2024. At the same time, the shortage of staff remains. This is an interesting point because it shows that simply increasing headcount does not automatically solve the problem.
In the KfW Municipal Panel 2024, 56% of the local authorities affected stated that staff shortages in building authorities were causing significant delays to projects. In almost 30% of cases, projects were even prevented as a result.
In a KfW survey, 74% of local authorities identified a lack of qualified administrative staff as a major obstacle to the digitalisation of schools. Although this is an older figure, it clearly illustrates the link between staff shortages and the potential for digitalisation to improve efficiency.
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