The Secret to Higher Profits: Data-Driven Employee Scheduling

Getting your sales staff ready for the holidays is essential to your shop’s success. Not only are they your biggest brand ambassadors, but they’re also the ones that engage the most with your customers, helping them find the products and services that best suit their needs. Their performance has a direct result on your shop’s performance.

But all staff aren’t created equal. Some are amazing upsellers, others are great at serving a high volume of customers, while others need more coaching.

When it comes to scheduling your employee shifts, your best-case scenario is that your top-performers work on your store’s busiest days, during your most profitable hours. While it doesn’t necessarily guarantee increased profits, performance-based employee scheduling is certainly stacking the odds in your favor.

Data-driven employee scheduling, but why?

Because you’re ensuring that your rockstar employees are working when it matters most — and that’s based on quantitative facts. You don’t want to build your employee schedule based on assumptions of who you think your best salespeople are, especially when you can know exactly who they are (without any guesswork).

To get started, you need to evaluate your sales staff’s performance, as well as your shop’s sales by the hour of the day.

Employee scheduling tip: Determine who your top-performers are

One of the first things you should look at when analyzing your sales staff’s performance is their average transaction value and the average number of items per transaction.

That information enables you to see which sales associates are the best at upselling and cross-selling. These are your star performers; the ones who bring in the most revenue.

Note: take into consideration the time of day the sales associate was working. Ideally, you should segment employees by which day (and the time of day) that they worked, and compare them to people who worked a similar schedule.

The sales figures of an employee who works on Saturday afternoons shouldn’t be compared to the ones working Monday afternoons. Compare apples to apples so that your findings aren’t flawed.

Analyzing this information ahead of the holidays enables you to schedule your top-performers during peak business hours, and proactively train underachievers before the holiday rush hits. Your goal is to schedule your highest performers when it matters most.

Which brings us to the next step, analyzing your sales by day, as well as by the hour of the day, to pinpoint exactly when you should schedule your rockstar employees.

Employee scheduling tip: Analyze sales by the hour of the day

Assuming that you’ve figured out who your top employees are, it’s time to see when you should schedule them.

The idea here is to pinpoint the days of the week and times of the day where your shop makes the most sales. Those are the times that you want your best staff working since you know they drive results. You can download easy-to-understand sales reports directly from your POS system that will clearly show you this information, without the hassle of manually calculating anything.

Schedule for success

Now that you’ve identified your top-performing staff and peak business hours, you’re ready to build your schedule.

Plan for your best staff to work during the busiest hours as often as possible. As for your weaker staff, take the opportunity to sit down with them and discuss the areas where they can improve.

For instance, if you notice that one of your employees needs help with upselling, perhaps they need additional product training. Rather than have them memorize from a list, consider having one of your best employees explain how they upsell, and which items pair well together and why.

The power of data-driven employee scheduling

Who you schedule, and when you schedule them, plays a big role in your shop’s profitability. Not only are you making sure that you make the most of the busiest times, but you’re also minimizing any losses that might offer from overstaffing at the low periods.  

Use your employee and sales data to your advantage! The right technology makes this information easy to access, interpret, and use in your decision-making process.