The Gradient: Finding Your Balance In Workforce Scheduling

By Joe Olson, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Workforce Management, Empower

Read Part 1

Talk to any retail operations leader about their current challenges, and chances are they will mention striking a balance between achieving desired service levels and managing the labor budget. In this second of a three part series examining retail workforce management, I will introduce a concept that enables retailers to strike a better balance between service and expense; one that can help deliver measurable sales results through bigger basket sizes and higher conversion rates.

Scheduling in a New Generation

Due to an increased reliance on a growing part-time workforce, store workforce scheduling has become even more complex and challenging.   Coupled with the increasing complexity of tasks at the store level, it’s not surprising that many operators struggle meeting their customer experience and service goals within the constraints of tight labor budgets.   The impact of under-scheduling can be clearly seen in lower conversion rates, smaller basket sizes, and poor customer service, while over-scheduling can blow the budget in the short term, leading to under-scheduling later in order to ”get the numbers back in line.”

As if all this weren’t enough, the growing part-time workforce also contributes to greater regulatory compliance risk, with frequent time-off requests, constant availability changes, and many other factors that need to be taken into account during the scheduling process. Progressive retailers have turned to automated scheduling to face the new world of scheduling complexity.  However, that’s really only a partial solution. Even with automated scheduling, it’s still possible to develop schedules that are either more expensive than needed or don’t offer the coverage that is required.

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