Photo: RetailWire
There may be another reason for retailers and restaurants to reconsider on-call scheduling of employees — the practice may be costing them sales
New research of employees at 28 Gap stores in the Chicago and San Francisco areas found that locations where associates had more consistent hours saw sales increase seven percent compared to those in the control group. Labor productivity in the stores with consistent employee schedules also increased five percent.
One explanation behind the improvement is that managers handling scheduling made sure to give preference to more experienced employees.
“It looks like managers did the rational thing — they had to improve stability, and so they picked the more experienced people,” Saravanan Kesavan, one of the researchers on the project, told The New York Times. “Now you have more experienced people in the store, and the productivity you’re seeing increased, leading to higher sales.”
In an article on Slate, the researchers from the University of California, the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina, wrote that their study shows a flaw in conventional wisdom, which holds that on-call scheduling is necessary to meet the demands of customer traffic flow to stores.
In reality, only 30 percent of variation in staffing could be attributed to shifts in store traffic. The vast majority of schedule changes, particularly the last-minute variety, were tied to issues connected to headquarters activity. Schedules might suddenly be altered, for example, when corporate executives drop by a store, requiring staff to go into overdrive to make it look just right, or when shipments arrive on the wrong day, or a “30-percent-off promotion changes to a 40-percent-off promotion and all the signage needs to be changed.”
One potential added benefit to more consistent scheduling not included in the study is a reduction in employee turnover. It stands to reason that workers who can plan childcare, doctor visits, etc. without concern that their plans will be upended are going to feel better about their employment than those who cannot.