Craft Schedules That Work for Everyone

Melanie was several months into her new job at a warehouse, and she and her partner were still trying to balance the demands of work and family. Melanie awoke at 4 a.m. each day. She used her phone’s flashlight to locate her clothes so that she wouldn’t rouse the rest of her household, which included two sons, one of whom had special needs. Her drive to work was 30 minutes, and if she was even a second late, she could be let go.

She liked the role, especially the higher pay it provided compared with her last job, but the hours were taking a toll. Upon accepting the job, she was surprised to learn that overtime was mandatory — something not uncommon for hourly workers in the industry. That meant she had to plan months in advance to attend her children’s school events, stockpiling sick time in order to leave work when she needed to. It also meant that when she was actually sick, she had to go to work anyway. She had already canceled multiple appointments with her doctor.

Her son with special needs experienced frequent challenges, which created a dilemma: Should Melanie leave work to pick him up at school when she inevitably got the call that he needed help, and lose her job? Ultimately, Melanie’s partner chose to make the sacrifice, quitting a much-loved job to better support their kids. But Melanie wondered whether she had made the wrong choice in sticking with her employer.

Melanie is a real person whose name we have changed to preserve her anonymity. She was interviewed as part of the research that one of us (Alex) conducted on the challenges facing both workers and managers employed in e-commerce fulfillment. Her story shows — and her coworkers would agree — that one of the most important drivers of employee satisfaction is an often overlooked aspect of people’s work experience: their schedule and hours. When schedules cause workers like Melanie to search for another job, employers bear the cost of recruiting, hiring, and training a replacement.

It’s not surprising that employees value good schedules so highly. While there’s no one-size-fits-all best schedule, certain scheduling arrangements can impose a high cost on workers and organizations. An extensive body of research has found that unpredictable, insufficient, and long hours induce economic hardship, disrupt employees’ personal lives, and harm workers’ mental and physical health. On the employer side, getting schedules wrong can harm customer satisfaction, productivity, profits, and the organization’s reputation. (See “The High Cost of Bad Schedules.”)

Many employees are even willing to take a significant cut in salary for more desirable work hours, according to a series of studies. Researchers analyzing a representative sample of all U.S. workers found that employees will, on average, trade a 16% reduction in compensation for 10 days of paid time off.1 Call center workers in a separate study said they would accept a 20% pay cut to avoid last-minute changes to their schedules.2 And workers surveyed at Walmart, the largest employer in the U.S., said they value getting their preferred number of hours each week and paid time off most highly among 11 nonwage aspects of their jobs.3

To understand just how important schedules are to workers, we analyzed the free text of nearly 3 million post-COVID Glassdoor reviews from more than 1,000 large U.S. employers. Schedule was the fourth most frequently mentioned theme (out of 39 in total), behind only culture, compensation, and learning and development opportunities. Leaders ignore schedules at their peril.

Our analysis shows that work hours are particularly salient in service industries with many front-line jobs, such as retail, restaurants, and home health care, but schedules also arise as a significant issue for white-collar professions, including those in business services, government, and consulting. While the challenges hourly workers face may be different from the concerns of salaried workers, work hours are important for them all. The figure “Schedule Is Particularly Important for Certain Employees” displays the industries whose employees are most (and least) likely to mention schedules in their Glassdoor reviews.

Getting schedules right can be fiendishly difficult. Scheduling is not a dry task of matching labor supply with work demands. Instead, it’s a contentious flashpoint where the competing interests of employees, managers, customers, investors, and external stakeholders come to a head.

And scheduling has become even more difficult as the traditional 9-to-5 routine has fragmented into countless variants. The rise of the gig economy means that more freelancers work nonstandard hours. Globalization requires teams to operate across time zones. Employers increasingly transfer demand volatility onto employees, who must work unpredictable schedules as a result. And remote work increases flexibility in when as well as where work gets done. In the U.S., more than one-third of all employed adults work outside the traditional Monday-through-Friday, 9-to-5 workweek, and some estimates put this share significantly higher.

Five Ways to Improve Schedules

To craft effective schedules in the post-9-to-5 era, leaders need to step back and fundamentally rethink what a schedule is and what it can be. Here are five recommendations to help them do so.

Ask employees which elements of their schedules are working and not working. The first step in improving schedules is painfully obvious and surprisingly rare: asking employees what is and isn’t working. If managers don’t do this, they risk solving the wrong scheduling problem.

A schedule can be better or worse in numerous ways. We’ve identified seven distinct dimensions of schedules that matter most to workers: flexibility, predictability, number of hours, standard hours, time off, breaks, and the work-life boundary.4 (See “Seven Attributes of Schedules.”) Taking a multidimensional view will be more productive than focusing on a single dimension, which risks reducing scheduling to a zero-sum battle between workers and employers.

For example, many people assume that schedule predictability is a prime concern for retail and food service workers. When writing a review of their employer on Glassdoor, however, workers in this sector were six to eight times more likely to mention a flexible schedule — one that allows them to adjust their work hours — than a predictable one. Their sentiment when discussing flexibility was 16 times more predictive of how they rated their work-life balance than schedule predictability was.

Posing open-ended questions such as “What do you like most (or least) about your schedule?” gives workers space to elaborate on their concerns and provides critical context about the issues they surface. If they complain about the number of hours, for instance, is it that they’re expected to work too many hours or that not enough hours are available to them? If the issue is time off, is the problem too few days off, an inability to schedule them, or social norms against taking time off even when employees are entitled to the days? An added benefit: Employees might also propose practical solutions, adapted to the specific challenges they experience, when they’re asked for their perspectives.

Tailor schedules to employee preferences. There is no schedule that accommodates the preferences of all employees. In acknowledgment of diverse scheduling needs, companies can craft hours that work for specific populations.

Marriott, for example, has recently reported success in reducing turnover by offering more roles between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. for parents with school-age children. At its Minnesota cheese plant, Land O’Lakes moved away from 12-hour shifts in a bid to attract more workers, especially those who couldn’t make the rigid schedule work because they had caregiving responsibilities, such as looking after aging parents. New flex roles allow workers to pick their start and stop times every few weeks.

Unique scheduling pain points often arise across roles within the same industry. For instance, store managers were the most dissatisfied with their work hours of any occupation we studied, and their biggest gripe was the sheer number of hours they were expected to work. Among warehouse workers, insufficient breaks was a critical pain point: They were six times more likely to complain about insufficient breaks than store managers were.

Even within the same demographic group or occupation, preferences can vary from one worker to the next. When asked about their ideal schedule, nurses at one large teaching hospital made it clear that the traditional approach to scheduling, where all nurses are required to rotate through the morning, afternoon, and night shifts, was not working for everyone.5 Nearly one-quarter preferred to work only the night shift, and 20% favored rotating 12-hour day and night shifts. After the hospital collected this information and factored it into its scheduling decisions, nurses’ well-being increased and their likelihood of quitting decreased, without any negative impact on hospital costs or patient care.

Duke University Health System has addressed both employee preferences and its own need to cover gaps in staffing with a “float pool” of more than 500 nurses, nursing assistants, and patient attendants who fill temporary staffing needs across the system’s three hospitals and dozens of clinics. The float pool attracts people who value the opportunity for ongoing learning and variety in their work.

Asking candidates about scheduling preferences at the point of hiring can also help ensure a better fit. Convenience store chain QuikTrip, for example, asks prospective employees about their availability and lets candidates know that their hours might fluctuate from season to season.6

Search broadly for innovative ways to improve schedules. Leaders can find ideas for improving schedules from many sources. For a start, employees can provide not only insight into their scheduling preferences but also concrete recommendations. A study of feedback from 150,000 U.S. nurses was replete with suggestions — such as paying bonuses to nurses who picked up shifts at the last minute, involving nurses in setting schedules, and implementing in-house “staffing agencies” to work in different parts of the hospital to increase the odds that nurses could find shifts that suited their needs.7

Competitors can be another source of inspiration. Store managers at Wegmans, for example, mentioned scheduling in Glassdoor reviews at about the same frequency as their counterparts at Publix. Wegmans managers, however, were nearly three times more likely to discuss scheduling positively compared with Publix store managers. Digging into what Wegmans does differently could provide concrete ideas for grocery stores that struggle with scheduling.

Sometimes the solutions may be homegrown — they just have to be identified and disseminated throughout the organization. One of us (Alex) conducted an in-depth study inside a company’s e-commerce fulfillment centers. Warehouse managers took distinct approaches to scheduling, even though they all worked for the same U.S. retailer, followed the same corporate policies, sold the same products, and were evaluated using the same performance metrics. A subset of managers had figured out how to offer more desirable hours while running a productive warehouse — practices that their colleagues could learn from and adopt as well.

Carefully designed academic experiments can provide ideas for reimagining when and where employees work. Phyllis Moen and Erin Kelly led an intervention in the IT department of a Fortune 500 company in which they randomly assigned teams to take a novel approach to scheduling their time.8 Managers and employees jointly decided which days they would meet in person, what kinds of decisions and discussions were best suited to physical meetings, and which tasks could be completed effectively by employees independently.

The results were promising: The employees reported lower levels of burnout and work-life conflict, better sleep, more exercise, and higher job satisfaction. In the three years following the intervention, those who had gained the added flexibility were 40% less likely to quit than those who hadn’t. A separate study with electrical and maintenance technicians found that those who were randomly assigned to a cohort with greater schedule flexibility were more productive, were less likely to miss work, and experienced higher well-being.9

Part of what made Moen and Kelly’s intervention so effective was that employees were involved in reimagining their schedules and where they completed their work. They were nearest to the work and felt most acutely the pluses and minuses that came with different scheduling and location configurations.

Vendors are a final source of scheduling innovations. Startups like Shyft and Homebase weave employee preferences and engagement into their scheduling products through features such as self-scheduling and shift swapping. The increased use of AI is likely to further improve the matching of work hours with individual preferences.

Redesign work to improve schedules. Scheduling challenges often arise from other operational choices that trickle down to work hours. A study of Gap retail stores found that much of the variability in work hours resulted from inaccurate shipment information, last-minute promotional changes, unexpected deliveries, and preparation for visits by corporate staff members.10 Sometimes the best way to improve work hours is not to fix scheduling per se but to improve other operational practices.

In Alex’s study of e-commerce fulfillment centers, the most successful warehouse managers focused on cross-training so that their staff members had the range of skills needed to do different jobs. The cross-trained employees could pick up the slack when other teams needed help or their own team was short on work. Empowering workers to fill in where they were needed most increased schedule stability across the warehouse while boosting efficiency, customer service, and employee satisfaction.

Other operational moves can also make it easier to create win-win schedules. The same fulfillment centers shortened the window of time that customers had to make an online purchase and still receive packages the next day. This change had limited impact on sales but dramatically reduced how often workers had to stay late to fill last-minute orders. The ability to hold off on filling late orders until the next day also allowed the warehouses to push some of the volume on busy days into slow days, making workers’ schedules more consistent throughout the week.

Work design impacts the number of employees required to get work done, and staffing levels relative to work demands have an obvious and direct impact on schedules. One surefire way to reduce persistent overtime, make it easier for workers to take time off, and allow for regular workday breaks is simply to hire more employees. Some health systems have learned this lesson, promoting lower nurse-to-patient ratios to improve their schedules and patient outcomes.11

Empower local managers, and reinforce desired social norms to guide scheduling. With recent advances in artificial intelligence, it might seem as though an algorithm could optimize schedules without the need for human input. That might happen someday, but we’re not there yet. A recent study of a large grocery chain found that supervisors frequently modified the work hours set by the retailer’s AI scheduling algorithm.12 Schedule modifications by store managers were associated with higher foot traffic and average customer purchases, and changes by more seasoned managers had a larger impact on performance.

There’s good reason to believe that managers will — and should — retain discretion when setting schedules and filling unexpected gaps: They are closest to the facts on the ground and best suited to understanding and managing trade-offs. A study of schedulers across nursing homes found that some excelled at identifying creative ways to balance the needs of patients, staff members, and financial targets.13

Decentralizing scheduling creates room for experimentation that yields promising approaches. Informed by employee feedback, senior leaders can identify pockets of excellence, codify the lessons, and tap the most effective managers to coach their peers. That said, empowering local managers also creates space for bad scheduling practices to arise. Supervisors might, for instance, allocate the best shifts to their cronies or use scheduling decisions to exert power over workers.

Whether suboptimal scheduling decisions arise depends strongly on social norms. Social norms define what behavior is expected inside an organization and deemed appropriate in a given situation. When it comes to how employees experience corporate culture, the norms shaping decisions that matter to them, including how work hours are set, dwarf the impact of core value statements or executives bringing their “authentic selves” to work.

A study of scheduling across one company’s nursing homes found that different norms guided how such decisions were made.14 In some facilities, a share-the-pain norm meant that everyone was required to chip in equally to cover gaps, while in other facilities, a work-life-needs norm gave preference to employees with the most pressing personal needs at the moment. Schedulers guided by the work-life-needs social norm delivered better patient outcomes.

How managers set expectations and evaluate performance also shapes when employees work. Managers establish norms when they hold specific slots for meetings, make it clear how quickly they expect responses, and favor employees who arrive at and exit the office at certain times.15 Assessing employees based on face time or quick replies to late-night emails encourages long, grueling, and often counterproductive hours compared with assessing them based on output.16

Top leaders can clarify the social norms they want to guide scheduling decisions, monitor whether middle managers are honoring these norms, and of course make sure they walk the talk themselves.

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Many of us will spend a third or more of our waking hours at work, but we don’t all spend those hours in the same way. Some of us arrive at work before the sun rises. Some of us have a new workplace and new hours every other week. Some of us use our smartphones to work anytime, anywhere, even in bed. And surely these habits will continue to change over time as new technologies, corporate fads, and managerial expectations influence how schedules take shape.

What we all have in common, though, is that our schedules have a major impact on how we are feeling day to day and in the long run. Companies are also affected because the hours they offer their employees are so consequential to the energy, enthusiasm, and commitment that their most vital assets bring to the job. Given the centrality of schedules to work, workers, and businesses, the potential to improve well-being and performance by improving schedules is immense.