Automated Scheduling Programs

[TheFugitive]

I was reminded of this topic by a news story I saw about some union that had won a contract concession that management would give them 150 days advance notice before implementing any new technology in the workplace.

The article specifically mentioned retail scheduling programs as a bit of technology that has earned workers' ire.  And I must admit, having worked with these back in the 90's, I can kind of see their point.

We used a scheduling program at Hills that was just a joke.  It would try and focus cashier scheduling at times of the week when data showed the store was the busiest.  Fair enough.  But that meant lots of microshifts of a couple of hours that nobody wanted.  It did not really pay anyone to drive to the store and clock in if their shift was going to be that short.

Every Tuesday my entire afternoon was taken up fixing problems like this with the schedule.
If the idea was to save me time the program utterly failed at that.

The program at Service Merchandise was even worse.  It would run on a Friday thru Sunday schedule.  After the first 3 days of that schedule (Fri., Sat., Sun.) it would poll the sales numbers and recalculate.  If you were behind plan it new you were very unlikely to make that up between Mon. and Thurs.  So it would start cutting shifts.  A cashier who had been given a 4-9PM shift on Friday might have it taken away from them on Monday morning.  And it was their responsibility to go and check the recalculated schedule.

Conversely if you ran ahead of sales plan it might add shifts.  Which employees would complain about because they had already planned out their week based on the schedule they got Friday.  People would quit because it became impossible to plan life around their part-time jobs.

As a former boss of mine who was Indian liked to say, "too much of technology".