Having spent eight years at Home Depot before coming to Lowe's almost four years ago, I have seen a trend in both. Man hours in the store are based on sales per man hour, and that dollar amount tends to increase each year.
Positions like receiving, unloaders, stockers, and even front end in some cases are not considered as producing sales dollars, but a very necessary part of store operations. Though they are not directly assigned to a sales department producing sales dollars, their hours come from sales and specialty departments.
Each year, we seem to have less and less CSA's in seasonal departments that generate the highest percentage of store sales. (i.e. outside garden and OPE). In the past couple of years, the market that I am in has done away with area PSA teams and gone to a combined Market PSA team to cover store resets. More and more resets are now falling to individual departments to complete. Coming out of last winter's Store Managers' meeting was more focus on IMPACT hours and enforcement to Customer Service and depletion of tasking in those hours.
The tasks are still there, and have to be done, but with less bodies to do, and less hours to do. The "marathon" staff meetings have been eliminated, supposedly, and the focus is to keep Department and Zone managers on the floor. There will be cuts in the store, yes, and there will also come a revamping of middle management, and the elimination or merging of positions. The good thing will be will be the streamlining of certain tasks that are redundant.
Technology will improve, which is a major corporate expense to upgrade, but it will come, and the paper trail will be replaced with an electronic paper trail, which really is good. More and more of a push will be toward Internet sales and prioritizing them. More and more of the installed sales will be transitioned toward PSE and PSI sales. This can eliminate the time that associates spend with one individual customer making the sale, and put the actual sale in the hands of the installer.
I suspect there will be the elimination and merging of departments to more of a zone manager with ASM's being cut to basically Specialty, Merchandising, and Operations. Stores will run on what seems like skeleton crews, until corporate concludes they have reached the bare minimum of staffing in stores.
Store HR's will probably be cut in half or to about 1/3 at first, but then be reduced to just one or two at Market level. Home Depot was doing this when I left there in 2013, and has gone even further over the years that I have been gone. Lowe's seems to be trending in the same pattern.