For retailers, daily staff scheduling is a complex puzzle. The goal is to match available staff, talent, and skills with business demand to create a schedule that maximizes store productivity while minimizing labor costs.
This challenge is growing. The market is more complex, and customers demand a better shopping experience across all channels, including the physical store. Recent market analysis reflects this, with 71% of retailers reporting that their store workload has increased in recent years.
The High Cost of Manual Scheduling
Despite this increasing complexity, a surprising number of businesses still rely on manual scheduling processes with no analytical support. Nearly 65% of retailers manage schedules by hand, leading to common problems like overstaffed shifts, rushed and understaffed periods, and poor levels of productivity. These inefficiencies directly and negatively impact business results.
If the right employees with the right skills are not in place at the right time, the organization cannot deliver a profitable, engaging, and satisfying customer experience. For operational managers, building an accurate schedule to meet this goal can be a significant challenge.
Why Basic Automation Isn't Enough
There is no doubt that automated scheduling can improve the lives of operational managers, but simple automation is not a complete solution. If a generated schedule does not account for factors like customer visit forecasts, it will be inefficient. This results in wasted costs during overstaffed shifts or lost sales opportunities during understaffed ones. Automating a flawed scheduling process will only produce disappointing results faster.
Success comes when schedules are generated with a performance-based approach. This strategy enables schedules to be precisely aligned with the expected demand on the store floor.
Retailers with higher levels of scheduling accuracy are doing a better job of delivering quality customer experiences. They can better anticipate business demand to provide excellent service at an appropriate labor cost. Ultimately, this is reflected in achieving higher revenue per employee by improving overall productivity.
What is the True ROI of a Performance-Based System?
Implementing a performance-based approach without the right tools and analytical support is nearly impossible. Only the most advanced workforce management tools provide the necessary high-level analytical capabilities. These platforms unite predictive and prescriptive analytics, offering comprehensive visibility into business performance and providing the knowledge needed to improve a manager's decision making process.
This raises key questions: What is the return on investment (ROI) for these tools, and is the return fast enough to justify the acquisition?
A performance-based scheduling system addresses different goals across an organization, linking each one to a global improvement in business results.
Key Benefits Driving Your Return on Investment:
- Financial Performance: Deliver results at an acceptable cost to satisfy financial and business executives. This is achieved by cutting labor costs and increasing revenue through enhanced employee productivity.
- HR and Compliance: Strictly comply with labor regulations to satisfy HR departments. This helps reduce labor conflicts and associated risks.
- Employee Engagement: Provide transparent and fair scheduling for every employee. This approach is proven to reduce employee complaints and absenteeism while increasing job satisfaction.
- Manager Productivity: Deliver schedules easily and quickly. This reduces the administrative workload for store managers, freeing them up for higher value tasks.
Each of these points adds significant value, ensuring an early ROI. Furthermore, many of these tools are now offered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. This notably reduces the time required to recover the investment, with a positive return possible within the first month in some cases.
Beyond Scheduling: Unlocking Workforce Analytics
Automating scheduling with a performance-based approach does more than improve efficiency. It also allows an organization to use scheduling data in new ways. Labor is a huge expense for retailers. With an accurate schedule and performance history, it is possible to generate dashboards with workforce and labor data. This helps executives understand how labor cost is spent against business results, allowing for better decision making about human resources, talent needs, and future investment.
Today more than ever, retailers must optimize and automate scheduling to improve performance, business results, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement. Thanks to advances in analytics, this is now an achievable goal for any organization with a modest investment.
For organizations ready to harness these benefits, exploring advanced workforce management tools is the logical next step. Solutions like Novacal are specifically designed to deliver performance-based scheduling, providing the analytical power needed to optimize labor costs, boost productivity, and enhance both customer and employee satisfaction.