A customer walks into a busy retail store at 5pm on a Thursday. Two team members are occupied. The customer browses for a moment, sees no one available and leaves.

Footfall rises on a busy Thursday evening, but transactions don’t. Customers may leave without finding help or someone to ring up their sale, while managers have limited visibility into whether staffing matched demand. At other times, the opposite problem can occur: Labour is rostered when customer demand isn’t there, or unexpected gaps are filled through additional hours and overtime. 

Considering labour is one of retail’s highest operating costs, getting rostering right is a commercial priority. Boston Consulting Group reports that labour accounts for nearly 40 per cent of total operating costs in Australia’s retail sector, second only to cost of goods sold.

Matching staffing to demand is rarely straightforward. Retailers need to account for predictable peaks such as Christmas and Black Friday, as well as changes in footfall by store, day and hour. Add a casual-heavy workforce, award complexity and rosters that may still be built from last week’s schedule or a spreadsheet, and it becomes easy for staffing levels and customer demand to fall out of step. 

Retail has made progress in connecting workforce information, but visibility is still a challenge. Elmo’s research found only 34 per cent of retail organisations have fully centralised HR, payroll and workforce data, while almost a third still rely on manual processes or spreadsheets to gather HR metrics. Without a connected view, it can be harder for retailers to see how staffing aligns with demand across individual stores and locations.

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