Making workforce management digital 

The challenge

A leading grocer was keen to move store managers away from pen and paper rotas to a digital workforce management tool. However, after piloting the new tool among a select group of stores, the initial feedback was overwhelmingly negative. Research was needed to understand why the feedback was so negative, and what could be done to improve the tool. 

What we did

We began by interviewing several of the change managers working with the stores to understand their perspective on the tool and to receive a thorough demonstration of how it worked. As the intermediaries between head office and the stores, they were able to offer a dual perspective, identifying flaws within the tool but also in how stores were using it. 

We then interviewed managers from stores large and small to understand whether there were any differences in their experience of the tool. Given the broad focus of the research, we covered a wide range of topics during the interviews, from the socialisation of the tool to its usability to its impact on their particular store. To explore usability, we asked them to narrate several key journeys using a dummy version of the scheduling tool. 

What we found

We uncovered a deep disconnect between the tool’s conceptual model of the store, and the reality of the shop floor. As such, managers were frequently having to input false information to please the tool, even though it owed nothing to reality (e.g. additional hours, break times etc).  

In addition to this were a number of basic issues that were hampering usability and satisfaction, from the inability to remove a shift once it had been added to merging day shifts and night shifts (making it harder for night managers to run the store as they needed). 

The outcome

The next iteration of the tool incorporated the majority of our recommendations and helped to reduce the gap between the tool’s conceptual model of the store and managers’ mental models, resulting in improved satisfaction and reduced queries. The tool can now be found in stores around the country.