The Solution to Service-Worker Churn

Retailers have long known that high turnover among frontline employees is expensive, draining both time and money as managers constantly recruit and train new staff. Conventional wisdom holds that scheduling is a major driver of turnover. To reduce churn, retailers are urged to post schedules earlier; create consistent, predictable, and fair work schedules; and ban “clopenings”—schedules that call for an employee to work a closing shift and then an opening one the next day. Those steps can help, but a study we conducted of 280 million shifts worked by 1.3 million employees across 20 major U.S. retail chains found that reality is far more nuanced. Different aspects of scheduling affect each store differently, and only an analysis of data can determine which ones are the most important for a given site, and even to what degree scheduling is the culprit fueling turnover.