In both food and specialized retail, poor time management often results in hours spent on non–value-added tasks, idle periods with no activity, or overtime due to unbalanced workloads that could have been better distributed. Whether in supermarkets or specialty stores, 20% to 30% of working time is lost this way.
Yet all the major shifts in retail rely on one critical lever: effective time management. How can teams meet their daily operational demands, keep up with sector changes, and still stay focused on profitability and customer experience?
Reclaiming mismanaged hours unlocks powerful opportunities to address these organizational challenges — but only if you can measure and identify this hidden time potential.
So the real question becomes: how can you turn time management into a strategic asset?
I) What opportunities arise from measuring and identifying poorly used hours?
Imagine you’ve successfully measured, identified, and recovered your poorly used hours… Now consider all the opportunities this opens up to reinvigorate your store and deliver a unique customer experience — a true “anti-Amazon” remedy for both your clients and your team. Are you ready to dream a little?
Better sales advice
In specialized retail, customer knowledge and support throughout the buying journey are essential. Shoppers expect expert, personalized advice — and full availability from store staff. Reallocating time to sales support, at the right moments, can significantly increase revenue… and boost the number of happy customers who’ll return!
Optimized management of phygital services
Having hours and staff available to ensure the quality of services – order preparation for home delivery or the various types of Drive – are a major advantage in the quality of the customer experience. And what can we say about a trained after-sales service team, available and properly staffed at peak performance? The best in the operational world!
Engaging training for store teams
As the retail environment shifts, teams must adapt and embrace change. The adoption of new technologies comes with a need for time — to get familiar with tools and adjust to new ways of working. For example, sales staff using tablets must learn how they function and adapt to their new mobility. Similarly, a new checkout system requires technical training and a mindset shift to rethink queue management.
Allocating time for training and adaptation isn’t a luxury — it’s a strategic investment. With recovered hours, it’s possible. And the return on time, energy, and efficiency comes quickly. Magic, right?
Better maintained shelves and sections
In food retailing, for example, merchandising and maintaining a well-maintained market area, or allocating staff according to their expertise, at the right time, to the “traditional trades” (butcher’s, baker’s, cheesemaker’s, etc.), represent a necessary hourly investment to ensure a pleasant consumer experience (attractive shelf layout, clean shelves, effective signage, etc.) and without major irritants (breakage, queues, etc.). ) and without major irritants (breakages, queues, etc.).
Customers who find what they want, are served quickly, and benefit from the sound advice of someone knowledgeable in their specialty, are more likely to increase their shopping basket and return.
Smart use of versatility and multi-tasking
New organizations require employees to be multi-skilled, but also to broaden their areas of expertise, particularly in terms of specialization. For example, they must be able to provide back-up on the shelves or at the checkout during busy periods, but also move from the grocery to the traditional department, provide more upstream reception or take charge of events in parking lots ….
Fortunately, all the unoccupied hours you’ve identified make it easier for you to set up this type of organization, while being fair in the distribution of the workload. Employee occupancy is thus optimized, and everyone wins!
A unique in-store experience
Anchoring added value to the e-commerce experience takes time. In-store events that allow customers to taste, touch, test, listen – in short, to enjoy a “live sensory experience” – require you to mobilize the right people at the right time, not only before the event, but also during it … and perhaps even afterwards!
Readjust schedules according to needs and contingencies
Planned or unplanned absences, vacations, commercial calendars or unforeseen events. Having hours in reserve allows you to deal with all these eventualities, without compromising the quality of the customer experience. A peak in activity, just like the end of a season, is much more profitable if it’s well anticipated in terms of hours and dedicated staff! Similarly, a multi-skilled employee can, depending on his or her priorities, be assigned to temporarily replace an absent person! A real relief!
Do these opportunities make you dream? What if they were to become your reality?
II) Measuring and identifying poorly used hours to reinvest or save them
To date, there is only one reliable approach. Based on defining your store’s organization, forecasting activity flows, allocating workload, and conducting a detailed analysis, this method requires your full commitment and team buy-in — it’s your essential passport to performance.
Step 1: understand your actual operations
- What is really being done in the store?
- How much time does each task take?
- What variables influence workload?
This means modeling your store’s organizational setup and gaining awareness of how time is truly used.
Step 2: observe field reality with actual and forecast data
- How many people are assigned to tasks, and
- how are responsibilities and priorities distributed?
- How are peaks in activity absorbed based on influencing factors?
This step allows for a precise and realistic calculation of time spent per task, per person, throughout the day or week.
Step 3: compare workload vs. actual hours worked
Once you clearly know who does what and how long it takes, compare the workload to actual worked hours.
You’ll identify available time per individual, per team, per day — and reallocate it smartly.
Workload is thus smoothed and more equitably distributed. Business is managed on a daily basis in real time, for greater flexibility in the event of peaks, disruptions and unexpected events.
Only reporting data enables this kind of analysis, and only this analysis leads to well-considered, relevant decisions and actions aimed at improving point-of-sale performance.
In short, the reasons for and means of measuring and identifying poorly utilized hours logically lead to a reorganization of day-to-day activity within teams, assigning the right people at the right time to routine tasks and those linked to new services. And let’s not delude ourselves: the transformation of retail is still in its infancy, and services, as much as store concepts, point-of-sale formats and products sold, will continue to evolve in step with technological advances and consumer demands. Predicting the flow of customers and products sold, and the criteria influencing tasks, in order to optimize processes and gain flexibility, versatility and autonomy on the part of teams is, and will be, a guarantee of success and survival. There’s no room for improvisation in a context where the stakes are so high, and measuring and identifying poorly-utilized hours implies rigor and method, if you want to stay on course for sales and profitability!
Conclusion
The multiplication of tasks linked to the transformation of distribution, business constraints, and the complexity of criteria inherent to the sector and influencing activity, demand that this methodology be carried out using a high-performance tool! Without one, the challenge is impossible. Timeskipper, the Saas platform for managing daily activity, is the most advanced solution on the market for measuring and identifying poorly-utilized hours. Not only does it provide information on what is actually “done”, but it also integrates all the company’s actual and forecast data, as well as data linked to external factors, to optimize work reorganization. It’s easy for operational teams to get to grips with, and highly effective for the point of sale. With an ROI of less than 6 months and the possibility of recovering more than 50% of misused hours, the Timeskipper platform has already been acclaimed by numerous players in the food retail and specialized distribution sectors.
To find out more about our methodology, download our White Paper.
