Last week I came across some research by Joan Williams, the Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, along with her colleague Penelope Huang. A long title to get to the topic: workforce management, particularly of low-wage, hourly employees (i.e., retail store associates, though they are represented by other industries as well).

The research’s objective was to delve more deeply into the workforce management challenges of these low-wage workers, the point being that most research on work/life balance in particular has focused on professional workers who work long hours, and not on hourly employees. Williams’s and Huang’s primary finding: that employers are creating structural issues that naturally drive the high turnover and absenteeism that is often found in hourly retail work, and that these structural issues are not only expensive, they can be avoided.

Her findings piqued my interest because technology — workforce management technology (WFM) — is both a cause of these structural issues and a solution. On the cause side, workforce optimization, with its scheduling in 15-minute increments, creates havoc for low-wage employees because they cannot anticipate a set schedule every week. While this may not be too much of a big deal for a high school or college kid, it is a very big deal to a single working mother who has to figure out child care. The report, titled Improving Work-Life Fit in Hourly Jobs, details heart-wrenching tales of people facing choices like leaving their kids home alone or relying on friendly public transport bus drivers to make sure their kids get home from school because their variable hours mean they can’t use the same day care options day-to-day – to meet the flexibility requirements for optimization-driven schedules, it might mean that you would need a day care option that was open from 6am to 10pm. I don’t know of any day care that does that.

I have a feeling that WFM has also increased the use of shift cancellations, another source of trouble. Part of the business case for WFM is built upon the idea that you don’t have to wait a month to figure out that you spent too many labor dollars against a sales volume that didn’t justify it. With the visibility that WFM provides, a store manager might know mid-week that staffing for Thursday or Friday will have to be reduced in order to stay within budget. And in some cases, hospitality in particular, the report documents examples where shift staffing decisions are made hourly, literally based on the number of customers in the building during that hour. Again, examples abound of employees who arrange the most complicated scenarios just to make sure their children have care, resulting in things like an hour commute across three buses, only to find when they get to work that their shift is being cancelled.

The authors make the point, and they make it well, that current trends in workforce management have yielded extreme flexibility for the employer, but resulting in a complete lack of stability in the workforce. And don’t mistake my point – technology is not to blame. It is simply being used to more efficiently automate what is turning out to be expensive behavior that undermines customer service objectives in the end. Hopefully, retailers are starting to realize that this is an unintended — and negative — consequence of how they may have chosen to implement optimization and WFM.

The good news is technology is also part of the solution. One of the best features of today’s WFM systems is the ability to easily track employee availability. Employees can indicate their availability, their ideal hours, and when they simply are not available. They can do this on a computer at work, online from home, and increasingly on their mobile phones as well. When this happen, it’s not managerial preference that drives who gets staffed when, but the careful ranking and consideration of availability, performance, seniority, experience, and any other skills or constraints that go into a schedule. It’s more fair for employees, and it results in fewer cases of schedule adjustments than when a store manager forgets that Joe asked for Saturday off this week and schedules him anyway. The report shows that a lot of these optimized schedules also aren’t as variable as you’d expect – sometimes as little as 3 hours’ difference across a 200-hour work week.

WFM also increasingly helps with shift adjustments as well — and for store managers, this is where the real business case lies. I know from personal experience how much time can be spent desperately begging any employee you can get a hold of to come in and work because either someone was absent or far more people showed up to shop than expected. WFM can help automate both shift swapping — so that employees can work it out amongst themselves if they need to change shifts — and finding emergency replacements. The latest on that front includes an automated text message, phone call or email going out to available employees (determined by their self-reported availability that the system tracks), with a first-come, first-served response – the first one to claim the shift gets it.

What WFM can’t do anything about, though, are two very key areas. One of those is metrics. I’ve written in the past that payroll as a percent of sales should be killed as a measure for store managers. Aside from the fact that it is as anachronistic as measuring yearly store comparable sales in an increasingly cross-channel world, it’s not the most accurate measure of labor effectiveness (unless you’re explicitly budgeting labor hours to support show-room activities that drive online sales) – conversion rate is, combined with time spent per customer. That measure is driven by store traffic, not sales, and it exposes two variables that retailers should be paying more attention to than labor costs: how well am I driving traffic to stores, and how well am I converting that traffic into sales? Labor budget is the output of such an analysis, not the controlling variable.

The other is a practice I have long detested, and that is de-scheduling people, rather than laying them off. In the report, Williams and Huang talk about a scheduling vicious cycle. Because of the havoc that flexible schedules create in the personal lives of employees, there is often absenteeism and turnover. To protect against it, employers – managers, actually – end up carrying a lot more people on their team than they really have adequate hours for. They do it so that they have a deep enough pool of employees to pull from when there is the inevitable absent worker. The problem is, especially for low-wage workers, employees don’t just want more hours, they need them. And so they work two jobs, or they’re managing child or elder care by the skin of their teeth – and when their schedule takes some strange twist or turn, they get caught out and can’t change their life situation fast enough to respond. So they call in sick, or they don’t show up — they can’t show up. Or they have to choose between one job or the other. And it becomes a vicious cycle — employees get stuck, they don’t show up. Managers respond by hedging — keeping more employees on the schedule for fewer hours — so that they perceive some flexibility in covering when someone is inevitably absent. Employees compensate by either taking on another job or cutting into essentials like child care.

The problem is that there are a lot of people for whom retail is just not the job that end up with minimal hours. I’m not a labor lawyer, so I don’t know the legal implications, but I do know the cultural ones, because I’ve seen it firsthand. If you’re the one who gets 8 hours a week, everyone involved knows that it’s because the manager doesn’t want you working, but doesn’t want to lay you off, either. Corporate requires that if an employee is to stay on the payroll, they need a minimum number of hours a week or per month, and the manager hopes that the bare minimum number of hours encourages you to move on to another job, so that you leave, as opposed to the company asks you to leave. But during those 8 hours of work, here is a surly employee on the job, bitter because she knows she’s on the outs with management, angry that everyone else knows it too — you only have to look at the schedule to see it — and taking it out on coworkers and customers alike. That also is not helping a retailer meet their customer service objectives.

I like the way that Zappos does it — pay people to quit. Give them 6 months on probation, and at the end of 6 months, either stay on and commit, or take some sum of money and run. If your heart’s not in it, $200-$500 cash sounds like a great breather to find you a job that does work, and it gets rid of the bitter struggle between an unhappy manager and an even unhappier employee.

Bottom line — read this report. You can find it here: http://www.worklifelaw.org/pubs/ImprovingWork-LifeFit.pdf . It’s long, I admit, but worth chewing on. At RSR, we’ve been warning for a while now that cross-channel consumers are putting new pressures on stores, and employees in particular are bearing the brunt of it. How the industry views that workforce is going to have to change. And as Williams and Huang point out, the way things are already isn’t that great — too many employers don’t realize exactly how much extreme labor flexibility actually costs them. I have a feeling those costs are becoming more explicit, as retailers struggle to respond to more educated, sophisticated, and demanding consumers.