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Will automated scheduling ease retail’s staffing problems?
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt from a current article from the Retail TouchPoints website.
While training shapes an employee’s ability to work effectively, scheduling directly affects job satisfaction. But the question remains for many retailers: Should we give associates the ability to assign their own schedules? If so, how do we accomplish this effectively?
When using automation, continually finding out the availability of the staff can get complex.
“Since that can be a hindrance to generating the schedule, as constantly updating that info can be a pain, one way of getting around that is to allow employees to pick their own schedule,” said Scott Knaul, CEO of SMK Workforce Solutions. “They can line up the available shifts and set up a priority-based system, which allows certain employees to select specific schedules first.”
Although retailers often seek ways to allow employees to set their own schedules, they can do even more to offer their younger workers schedule flexibility. Wegmans, for example, is allowing employees who are college students to work at their home store during summer and winter breaks, and at a different location when away at school.
For other retailers aiming to employ Millennials and their younger Gen Z counterparts, many workforce management technologies claim the ability to simplify scheduling based on factors such as employee rank and flexibility. These workforce management platforms are often compatible with mobile devices, so retail teams can leverage them outside the store at all times.
Managers can use mobile devices to share schedules with employees, eliminate stressful last-minute call-outs and notify team members of schedule changes. Employees can even use mobile apps to set a schedule on their own time, or contact each other when a schedule changes.
Discussion Questions
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: Do you see more pros or cons in giving store associates greater flexibility in setting their schedules? Will automated scheduling significantly ease problems of understaffing and overstaffing?
Poll
BrainTrust
Bob Amster
Principal, Retail Technology Group
Ralph Jacobson
Global Retail & CPG Sales Strategist, IBM
Giving staff some flexibility to set their own schedules does have benefits as noted, but first and foremost retailers need to ensure they have the right people at the right times — the business ultimately needs to come first. While there are plenty of benefits with automated scheduling, and it’s a worthy pursuit, it’s still challenging to implement. While the article nicely describes the ease and simplicity of using mobile devices for staff scheduling, in my experience many retailers are still far from establishing a formal mobile device policy and so these benefits are still out of reach.
While there is no question that scheduling tools can be very beneficial and that these tools are getting better every day, managing people and schedules is still complicated and management oversight is still very much required.
The challenge is getting the correct people with the appropriate experience and talent at the correct time — not just an available body. As we have seen over the years on RetailWire, meaningful human interaction with a prospective customer is the most valuable touchpoint during the shopping journey. It’s very easy to get it very wrong but invaluable when you get it right! (Right Lowe’s?! — that one’s for you and your Dad, Al.)
Staffing flexibility is definitely a good thing to maintain talented staff but it is even more important to have the correct staff available at the right time to ensure customers are getting their questions and concerns addressed.
Allowing employees to record their preferences goes a long way to employee/job satisfaction. Some employees can only work on weekends or evenings, other can only work during the week. Priority or seniority can be factored into who gets preference when there is a conflict. The sophisticated labor management software products will build those options in. But, as usual with sophisticated software, the more options it provides, the more time and care is required to set the options correctly. Under and overstaffing can be solved by management allotting only so many hours to a shift or to a day.
I would not be using the term, “automated scheduling” in this discussion. This kind of technology has literally been around for more than two decades. What we need to differentiate is the ability of a scheduling system to learn the needs of staff and make adjustments based upon all facets of the business, including staff’s desired shifts, specific skills required for those shifts, anticipated shopper traffic flow, etc. Taking both internal and external data sources (e.g., weather, local sports events, etc.) can help determine demand for shopper traffic, as well as demand for staff work schedules, etc. These artificial intelligence capabilities matched with individual staff desires can lead to a truly cognitive scheduling tool.
Scheduling is the tip of the iceberg in staff engagement. Everyone wins when rights, privileges and responsibilities are understood, accepted and balanced. My best retail experiences have been with staff who love doing what they do. Given that this love relationship of people and what they do is usually an element of the operating mission, staff self-scheduling input makes every bit of sense.
I see more cons. Giving retail employees too much freedom usually backfires. There is too much drama outside the workplace so lateral scheduling policies will make little difference. They will always be disgruntled and there will be high turnover. The small percentage of retailers with high pay and stricter hiring standards are happy to make sure their rainmaker employees are satisfied. Their employees are more motivated to make it work for both employer and employee. With the massive labor shortage for low-wage labor, I suppose retailers with a low-wage labor model will throw mud at the wall to see if anything sticks.
Having spent many years in workforce management, automated (and intelligent) scheduling has always been a holy grail. Historically, most solutions took into account one of the three key stakeholders in retail: the retailer, the customer and the employee. The retailers were looking to maximize sales while optimizing labor cost. The customers were looking for sufficient staffing levels to provide proper customer service. The employees were looking for flexible solutions to work with their lifestyle. What we are seeing now is a convergence of all three. There are many challenges in retail. Scheduling the right employees at the right time to meet the needs of all three stakeholders should not be one of them with today’s technology.
Shift scheduling using computer algorithms has been around for some time now, but it has typically focused primarily on cost containment for the retailer. For hourly workers, one of the ongoing frustrations can be learning one’s shift schedule on Friday for the following week, which makes planning personal obligations more stressful. Even more disheartening can be discovering that one’s shift has been shortened after arriving for the workday — a situation that some restaurant workers encounter routinely.
Injecting some machine intelligence into the system offers a potential path to re-balancing this equation. It’s worth doing, since labor costs are not the only relevant component of retail profitability. Service levels could be gauged to optimize customer experience and promote sales. Predictive analytics could help with this while ensuring workers encounter fewer surprises in their personal schedules.
Will this lead to superior performance at retail? If labor cost is the only metric tracked, then probably not. But overall store performance might correlate more positively, all factors considered. As the sage Berra liked to say, “You can see a lot, just by looking.”
Giving store associates more control and flexibility in setting their schedules will go a long way in improving moral and will help reduce turnover (a costly expense for retailers). Leveraging the latest automated tools for labor scheduling is an imperative for optimizing staff levels. In addition to incorporating associate preferences, retailers can optimize staffing decisions by incorporating real-time retail information. For example, staff schedules can be adjusted in real time to account for changes in store traffic, transaction volume, weather and any other external factors that impact the number of associates needed in the store. Some vendors have already incorporated this real-time sense and respond mechanism into their solution portfolio.
Another potential benefit of a dynamic, automated scheduling system is using it as a store/associate call center overflow option. If call volumes to stores or call centers are high and additional sales support is needed, the call center can be integrated with individual store scheduling systems and staff availability to route overflow calls to an available associate in a store that is currently not busy (leveraging multiple time zones to smooth out peak volume).
While employee satisfaction is a key benefit of automated scheduling system, there are many other potential benefits. Who can really set a schedule a week or more in advance and get it right? Real time is key to meeting the customer expectation.
Employees empowered with the ability to work their own schedule can work if the employees understand that their schedule needs must remain secondary to the store’s. This is a circumstance that is often agreed to as a term of employment acceptance, but rarely lived up to over time.
Stores must also contend with disgruntled new hires that can not be afforded the same opportunity as those in the promised land. What is more difficult to control is prime time shortfall due to callouts and no shows. Many store managers own bonus plans that are measured against store hours. When there are associate shortages, the opportunity to apply the shortages towards the bonus may be far more compelling than the potential needs of customers. The plans almost never penalize for prime-time shortages so it isn’t difficult or even necessary to disguise the problem. This exposes the company to lost sales and erodes customer loyalty due to poor customer service performance.
Scheduling should be done off site reporting only to regional management or the owners to control and reduce the inherent problems of what is going on today.
I find it interesting there is not more feedback from leaders in the field, but rather “experts” who sit behind a desk all day.
From a field perspective, let us say business is good, so good you need to add shifts to your already pre-planned schedule. You now have to pick up the phone and call associates in. On one hand that associate and others say they cannot make it. The customers experience is now at risk. Let’s say the associate does want the extra hours, they still have to adjust their life schedule we are “protecting.”
Maybe business is tough and you have to cut shifts, now the associate morale is lessened and the customer experience still at risk. I say bring back the on-call shifts, just like so many other laws in retail labor, it is just part of RETAIL. Don’t want to have on call … don’t work retail. Don’t wanna work holidays and weekends, don’t work retail! Not sure where the confusion is, but my guess is the lawmakers and CEOs who sit behind desks and have no clue about brick and mortar business.
Automated scheduling helps give flexibility, but you need the right staffing level to match the traffic. It is a balance since your staff needs predictability (we learned what happens when scheduling automation for efficiency leads to scheduling that ruins the personal life or ability to have a second occupation/school) and you need coverage. It is a fine line.