Retail Staff Scheduling: Create a Schedule for Your Store

Here's a step-by-step guide to creating an efficient retail staff schedule, with tools and apps to assist.

Retail employee scheduling makes sure that your store is adequately staffed, your employees are happy, and your customers are well-served. In other words, it’s a critical part of retail operations. 

The difficulty lies in ensuring that employee schedules balance staff availability with foot traffic, labor budgets, and employment laws. The last thing you want to do is blow your labor budget on a slow Monday, only to have no teammates available to cover the busy Saturday shift. 

Here's a step-by-step guide to creating an efficient retail staff schedule, with tools and apps to assist. 

The importance of retail staff scheduling

Optimize labor costs

Effective staff scheduling helps manage labor costs by aligning staff hours with peak business times, reducing overtime, and minimizing idle time. It also ensures staffing levels are within budgetary constraints, preventing overspending on labor and cutting down on retail operating expenses.

Enhance customer service

Not all shoppers who visit your store know exactly what they’re looking for. Some require extra assistance, whether that’s help finding the right product for them or inquiring about your return policy when buying a gift. 

Retail employee scheduling software helps match staff availability with peak business hours and seasons. It prevents understaffing, which makes it difficult for your on-shift employees to offer the personalized shopping experiences that customers want. 

Boost employee morale

Fair and predictable scheduling helps employees balance their personal and professional lives, improving job satisfaction while preventing burnout by providing dedicated rest periods.

Meet legal and compliance requirements

Your retail business must adhere to local labor laws and regulations, such as the minimum wage, maximum working hours, and mandatory breaks. A designated retail working schedule following best practices allows you to avoid legal and compliance issues.

Improve operational efficiency

If staff aren’t available to assist customers with purchases, answer questions, and guide them, conversion rates and customer satisfaction could decrease. Scheduling is critical to ensuring that all necessary roles are filled, maintaining smooth store operations, and preventing disruptions.

Frank & Oak enlists the help of Shopify POS to cut retail costs. Its chief omnichannel officer, Guillaume Jaillet, says, “Compared to our previous POS system, we’ve seen a 47% reduction in operating costs and close to a 3% reduction in transaction fees, which are impossible to ignore. And this doesn’t even factor in the development work that would have been necessary before to connect the dots between OMS, digital, POS, loyalty, you name it.”

How to create a retail employee schedule

Choose an employee scheduling tool

Gone are the days of handwritten schedules and endless Excel sheets. Retail scheduling software streamlines the scheduling process by supporting shift swapping, automated scheduling, and labor cost forecasting—all of which can save you time and significantly reduce scheduling errors.

With Shopify POS, you can access third-party apps like Sling and EasyTeam to help you build a new retail schedule, track employee availability, manage time off, check for conflicts, and understand labor costs. Plus, integration with Gusto means you can run payroll on autopilot based on the rotas and shifts you’ve assigned.

Identify peak seasons

Retail is often cyclical, with peak sales periods varying depending on your industry. Generally speaking, stores tend to get the most foot traffic on weekends and holidays. Retail stores saw a 1.5% increase in foot traffic during last year’s Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, for example.

Instead of having the same retail rotas year-round, identify your retail business’ busiest times using sales data from previous years. This could be the holiday season, back-to-school weeks, or promotional events—periods where you might want to hire temporary staff to ensure you meet customer demand without overworking your full-time employees.

Shopify apps like Dor can also highlight foot traffic trends. If you notice that foot traffic spikes on sunny days, look at the weather forecast before planning your weekly schedule to arrange more coverage on days with nice weather. 

Know your store’s labor budget

Before scheduling your employees' rotas, understand how much money you have to spend. Calculate how much you can afford to spend on wages each week or month, accounting for insurance costs and perks (e.g., pension contributions or health care coverage).

Most retail scheduling tools offer a budgeting feature, allowing you to see real-time labor costs as you build the schedule. This will help you avoid overspending while ensuring you have enough staff to operate efficiently.

Create a core team

A core team of reliable retail employees can make scheduling much easier. These individuals are familiar with your retail store’s operations and can be counted on during peak times, such as weekends and holidays.

Start by identifying seasoned employees who excel in customer service and daily store tasks. Build an effective retail schedule around these team members, ensuring they cover the crucial shifts, then fill in the gaps with newer staff or part-timers.

Set clear expectations around communication

Effective communication is key to maintaining an organized schedule. Use your retail staff scheduling app to send out rotas well in advance, giving employees ample time to review their shifts.

Communication guidelines can also prevent last-ditch scrambles for someone to cover shifts the morning of. How much notice do you need if someone calls in sick, requests time off, or swaps their shift? How should they make those requests (i.e., through your scheduling app)?

Ask employees for feedback

Get into the habit of asking your employees for feedback on the retail scheduling process. Are there enough breaks during their scheduled shifts? Do they feel overworked or underutilized? Do they have any scheduling preferences or upcoming time off requests? Use their answers to make necessary adjustments to employees’ schedules, improving overall team morale and efficiency.

Create and share retail rotas in advance

Employees likely won’t have the same shift patterns every week. Sharing schedules or rotation schedules at least two weeks in advance lets employees plan their lives around work—whether that’s arranging childcare or making plans with their friends. 

This approach lets you accommodate employee preferences—a great way to encourage work/life balance and prevent staff from putting in time off requests for prearranged plans. 

Schedule time for retail staff training

Retail training is crucial for maintaining a high standard of service and ensuring that all employees are up-to-date with store policies and procedures. Proper training ensures employees know exactly what’s expected of them and how to complete daily tasks.

Regular training also enhances the overall customer experience. Shoppers get the same retail experience regardless of which team member they interact with.

Instead of asking employees to come in on their days off, allocate time slots for training new hires (especially if they are new to using a POS) and ongoing staff development into your retail rotas. 

Shopify POS makes staff training easy with video documentation for completing basic tasks. You can also assign user permissions for new hires to experiment with your POS system without affecting discount codes or inventory data.

Create a backup availability chart 

Even the best plans can go awry. Encourage your retail team to regularly update their backup availability chart—a list of extra shifts they can cover outside their scheduled hours. That way, if someone calls in sick or requests time off without much notice, the store manager can find another employee who can cover the shift (without texting all the team members on their days off). 

Balance staff rotas for your retail store

A well-balanced retail rota not only optimizes your store's performance but also fosters a positive, productive work environment, leading to a seamless retail operation and satisfied customers.

Sharing retail rotas in advance, allocating time for staff training, and maintaining a backup availability chart ensure that your scheduling process is both flexible and robust. Most importantly, actively seeking and incorporating employee feedback helps fine-tune the schedule to meet the needs of your team and your business. 

Shopify POS makes staffing easy thanks to integrations with scheduling tools like Sling and EasyTeam. Manage them from the POS system you already know and love—no extra logins required.

Retail staff scheduling FAQ

What is a rota in retail?

A retail rota is the schedule or timetable that outlines the working hours and shifts of retail employees. The rota details when each employee is expected to work, including their start and end times, days off, and any specific responsibilities they may have during their shifts.

How do you schedule retail employees?

To schedule retail employees effectively, follow these steps:

• Choose an employee scheduling tool
• Identify peak seasons
• Know your labor budget
• Create a core team
• Set clear expectations around communication
• Ask employees for feedback
• Create and share retail rotas in advance
• Schedule time for staff training
• Create a backup availability chart

What is a normal work schedule for a retail manager?

Most retail managers are full-time and work around 40 hours per week. They’re usually on shift during busy periods like evenings, weekends, and holidays.

How long do retail workers work in a day?

While there are no legal caps on the number of hours a retail employee works per day, most shifts are between four hours (for part-timers) and 12 hours (for full-timers). Employers must give employees regular paid breaks.