I left this job in response to absolutely garbage scheduling. For the month of November 2022, we would have 21 hours per week.
This sounded reasonable until I got clarification: 21 hours per week for the ENTIRE STORE. Total!
You can't run a store like that.
Sounds like my old regional. He was so smart and did right by his store managers — all my problems began when he left. They escalated when the boneheads bought the joint. I left when they cut me from salaried store manager down to hourly 'campus lead.'
A 40% paycut was a very polite invitation for me to quit.
When you hire, develop and maintain good managers and teach them how to drive financials, managers don’t need to be “spoon fed” payroll hours. I’ll be forever grateful to JVN, a regional manager that I had when I worked as a manager. The lessons and example that he demonstrated to me when I worked for him have contributed greatly to my success in my career AFTER Follett.
Whoops, that’s what I get for posting after a few gin and tonics.
I think you meant to say, “labor % decreasing”. Labor % is a percentage of payroll spent and sales. You want labor % to decrease or maintain it at same level.
That’s the way it used to be, if your labor % was increasing then they didn’t say much. Not anymore, if you do not hit your payroll budget you are in trouble, and it doesn’t matter if your sales are up to budget and you are ki-ling yourself working 70 hours a week to get there. There is also zero reasoning where these payroll budgets come from, they randomly pull them out of their a-s with no knowledge of what’s going on in the store. It’s mind boggling how the leadership of this company can know so little about store operations. The morale of anyone on the front line is about as low as it can go and they just do not give a damn.
When I was a regional manager…retired now, and those crazy payroll hour budgets came out, I would challenge my managers to maintain or improve the labor %, and to disregard the “hours” budget that the home office sent to us. Many times my store managers decreased their labor % by spending more payroll hours than budgeted and driving sales above budget and LY. As a region, we always improved our labor % by increasing sales and almost every year a “top 10 best performance” region, and twice, the best for overall financial performance. Shouldn’t driving financial results be the overall goal? And, not micromanaging the business out of existence.