January 24, 2013
Can Stores Schedule Their Way to Success?
While competitive wages always help, flexibility around scheduling also plays a critical role in employee retention, according to a panel of retail labor managers at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Big Show.
At the session sponsored by Kronos, Tom Finkel, workforce strategy and operations manager for Target, said it comes down to planning proactively, being flexible and being fair.
Around planning, he said Target "prides" itself on having schedules set two weeks — or at least 11 days — before the actual schedule starts to help associates best "plan their life around that."
From a flexibility standpoint, Target frequently cross trains its mostly part-time staff while "letting them know that the more they know, the more they can get scheduled if they’re looking for those hours." But Target also makes sure ample flexibility around availability exists to best match associate’s lifestyles.
Finally, Mr. Finkel says he looks for workforce management tools to help eliminate "those perceived biases of favoritism" and that the whole scheduling process becomes more transparent.
The panelists — including John Thrailkill, VP of store metrics & systems, customer support and business development, The Container Store, and Norm Diagle, manager, labor & productivity, Hannaford Bros. — said the goal of implementing workforce management solutions isn’t so much cutting costs but more efficiently balancing staffing to traffic patterns and making sure the correct associates are working the store depending on the required tasks. Another critical goal is freeing up associates for more customer-facing roles and saving store managers a few hours a week from preparing schedules. But panelists cautioned that associates and particularly store managers need to buy-into the scheduling system.
Mr. Thrailkill said that any sophisticated scheduling shouldn’t wind up "putting a machine" between the store manager and staff. While the tools aid in decision-making, managers should continue to know they ultimately sign off on the schedule. He likened the potential poor use of workforce management tools at the store level to a writer blaming Microsoft Word for a lousy writing effort.
"If you’re not a good writer, you’re not a good writer," stated Mr. Thrailkill. "The schedule’s the same thing. If you don’t have a good manager tweaking this thing and making sure it’s right, it doesn’t matter what tools you have. You’re going to have employees who are upset."
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
What do you see as the biggest challenges in labor scheduling at the store level? How can store managers best balance workforce management tools with the human element?
Poll
If upper management ensures that store managers have the same lofty goals they do, one large hurdle will be overcome. Sometimes it seems—as I overhear the impromptu scheduling in a store—that the managers’ goals are coverage without over extending the limits of per person payroll. This is where the trickle-down effect won’t be argued.
In my experience it is just too easy for companies to think about the process and not the results.
I had a client once who operated stores that were open 24 hours a day and required associates to lend lots of hands on service to what were billed as self service offerings. The labor consultant they used spent weeks crunching numbers, poured them into a black box reduction model and added a pinch of “proprietary algorithms,” shook and created a new scheduling model.
The problem?
It called for three associates per store per 24 hour period—meaning no breaks, no bio time, no meals. Needless to say while it made great sense as a hypothetical model, it failed miserably in practice.
I guess the best way to think about this is not as an exercise in cost cutting or labor cost savings or operations cost reduction, but to first remember that happy employees stay with you, don’t steal and offer good service to real customers who are demanding and aren’t really interested in your scheduling problems.
Retailing is about human beings and the better you treat people—as in letting them plan their lives better—the better they will perform.
I’m just happy to see retailers finally embracing labor scheduling. It’s easier for store managers to catch exceptions than to actually think through all the permutations—who’s allowed to work which shift, how many hours each employee has worked, etc.
Like all the other things we automate in retail, the goal is to manage the exceptions manually, not the rule.
This all sounds fine as far as it goes. Scheduling software coupled with unrealistic budgets have made “managers” penny-pinchers. Stores are being run at unrealistic coverage levels in many malls which reduce employees to stockers and cashiers—no one actively sells. Which makes sales go down. Which makes penny-pinchers scrounge to cut which makes sales go down which repeats the cycle until staffing seems little more than “keeping the doors open.”
There’s a lot of room for improvement across the board with this.
I think the key is to give managers guidelines instead of rules. I’ve seen stores lose good people because the manager couldn’t do what was right for the employee. Just because someone works retail shouldn’t mean they have to miss out on life. A good manager can balance the needs of the employee with the needs of the store. Something a software program can’t do.
The biggest problem? Well let’s see: we have too many people that want to work wintry Wednesday afternoons and not enough on sunny summer Sundays…and fewer still @2 a.m. Xmas Eve. In short, the 24/7 mania probably requires hiring different kinds of people, and I’m not sure they’re fully interchangeable (Target’s cross-training efforts notwithstanding). For David’s sake we’ll schedule the tatted hipsters when he doesn’t come in, and hope that everyone on the graveyard shift shows up in the mirror.
I still see more manual manipulation of what the scheduling system generates, resulting in increased labor expense. Flexibility must coexist on both the employee and the employer sides.
Employees should give their best availability to the scheduler, and the stores should try to work the automated schedules without editing, as much as possible.
It’s tough to achieve a transparent scheduling process that associates will perceive as fair and responsive. Workforce Management sometimes carries with it an unfortunate connotation—that staff can be arranged like interchangeable checkers on the board. If you define the game as pure cost optimization, process is likely to get in the way of practice, with unfortunate results for shoppers.
I personally believe WFM may be a too-narrow way to define the opportunity. For years I’ve been arguing for a performance management approach. It’s not enough just to hand out more precise marching orders to the soldiers, we need to evaluate outcomes in terms of shopper success and impact on stakeholder value.
Service levels can affect shelf replenishment, in-stock position, store cleanliness, employee satisfaction and shopper success. I think the onus is on the retail headquarters, not the store managers, to establish staffing guidelines, tools, practices and balanced scorecards that enable best performance.
Retailers who do this well focus on a balance between customer and employee engagement. When leaders authentically see the employee as a human being, and not a “human resource,” scheduling systems are balanced with recognition of what drives employee engagement—largely understanding and respect.
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If upper management ensures that store managers have the same lofty goals they do, one large hurdle will be overcome. Sometimes it seems—as I overhear the impromptu scheduling in a store—that the managers’ goals are coverage without over extending the limits of per person payroll. This is where the trickle-down effect won’t be argued.
In my experience it is just too easy for companies to think about the process and not the results.
I had a client once who operated stores that were open 24 hours a day and required associates to lend lots of hands on service to what were billed as self service offerings. The labor consultant they used spent weeks crunching numbers, poured them into a black box reduction model and added a pinch of “proprietary algorithms,” shook and created a new scheduling model.
The problem?
It called for three associates per store per 24 hour period—meaning no breaks, no bio time, no meals. Needless to say while it made great sense as a hypothetical model, it failed miserably in practice.
I guess the best way to think about this is not as an exercise in cost cutting or labor cost savings or operations cost reduction, but to first remember that happy employees stay with you, don’t steal and offer good service to real customers who are demanding and aren’t really interested in your scheduling problems.
Retailing is about human beings and the better you treat people—as in letting them plan their lives better—the better they will perform.
I’m just happy to see retailers finally embracing labor scheduling. It’s easier for store managers to catch exceptions than to actually think through all the permutations—who’s allowed to work which shift, how many hours each employee has worked, etc.
Like all the other things we automate in retail, the goal is to manage the exceptions manually, not the rule.
This all sounds fine as far as it goes. Scheduling software coupled with unrealistic budgets have made “managers” penny-pinchers. Stores are being run at unrealistic coverage levels in many malls which reduce employees to stockers and cashiers—no one actively sells. Which makes sales go down. Which makes penny-pinchers scrounge to cut which makes sales go down which repeats the cycle until staffing seems little more than “keeping the doors open.”
There’s a lot of room for improvement across the board with this.
I think the key is to give managers guidelines instead of rules. I’ve seen stores lose good people because the manager couldn’t do what was right for the employee. Just because someone works retail shouldn’t mean they have to miss out on life. A good manager can balance the needs of the employee with the needs of the store. Something a software program can’t do.
The biggest problem? Well let’s see: we have too many people that want to work wintry Wednesday afternoons and not enough on sunny summer Sundays…and fewer still @2 a.m. Xmas Eve. In short, the 24/7 mania probably requires hiring different kinds of people, and I’m not sure they’re fully interchangeable (Target’s cross-training efforts notwithstanding). For David’s sake we’ll schedule the tatted hipsters when he doesn’t come in, and hope that everyone on the graveyard shift shows up in the mirror.
I still see more manual manipulation of what the scheduling system generates, resulting in increased labor expense. Flexibility must coexist on both the employee and the employer sides.
Employees should give their best availability to the scheduler, and the stores should try to work the automated schedules without editing, as much as possible.
It’s tough to achieve a transparent scheduling process that associates will perceive as fair and responsive. Workforce Management sometimes carries with it an unfortunate connotation—that staff can be arranged like interchangeable checkers on the board. If you define the game as pure cost optimization, process is likely to get in the way of practice, with unfortunate results for shoppers.
I personally believe WFM may be a too-narrow way to define the opportunity. For years I’ve been arguing for a performance management approach. It’s not enough just to hand out more precise marching orders to the soldiers, we need to evaluate outcomes in terms of shopper success and impact on stakeholder value.
Service levels can affect shelf replenishment, in-stock position, store cleanliness, employee satisfaction and shopper success. I think the onus is on the retail headquarters, not the store managers, to establish staffing guidelines, tools, practices and balanced scorecards that enable best performance.
Retailers who do this well focus on a balance between customer and employee engagement. When leaders authentically see the employee as a human being, and not a “human resource,” scheduling systems are balanced with recognition of what drives employee engagement—largely understanding and respect.