Analyst, Workforce Management

Position Summary

The Workforce Management Analyst supports the store organization by translating sales forecasts, customer traffic, transactions, fulfillment demand, promotional activity, and operational workload into practical store labor plans. This role develops and maintains labor models, evaluates scheduling effectiveness, monitors productivity and payroll performance, and converts complex data into clear recommendations for store, field, and home office partners.

The analyst serves as a cross-functional connection point among Store Operations, Field Leadership, Finance, Human Resources, Information Technology, and Omnichannel teams, balancing customer experience, store execution, workforce capacity, and disciplined labor expense management.

What We Do - Accountabilities

Develops and maintains store-level labor forecasts, payroll budgets, workload standards, and recurring workforce reporting.

Monitors planned, scheduled, and actual labor hours and dollars; identifies trends, exceptions, and root causes.

Provides field leaders with clear insights and recommended actions related to labor planning, scheduling, productivity, fulfillment workload, and store operations.

Maintains documentation, assumptions, business rules, metric definitions, and end-user guidance for workforce processes and tools.

Supports annual plans, monthly forecasts, weekly labor planning, in-season reforecasts, peak periods, and ad hoc business needs.

Essential Functions

Develops store labor forecasts using sales, traffic, transactions, units, operating hours, seasonality, promotional activity, fulfillment demand, and other relevant workload drivers.

Translates enterprise sales and financial plans into weekly and daily store labor requirements and allocates approved payroll budgets to stores.

Analyzes planned, scheduled, and actual hours and labor dollars; distinguishes volume, wage-rate, workload, scheduling, staffing-availability, and execution drivers.

Develops and maintains workload standards for selling, checkout, shipment processing, replenishment, pricing, inventory, recovery, visual execution, opening and closing, administrative work, and digital fulfillment.

Evaluates how store work is performed and uses operational insight to challenge assumptions, improve workload standards, and strengthen labor planning accuracy.

Evaluates whether schedules align labor with customer demand, operating hours, delivery schedules, fulfillment volume, promotions, and task workload.

Supports the rollout, adoption, configuration, ongoing maintenance, and performance monitoring of automated scheduling processes for retail stores, including schedule generation, rule validation, field guidance, exception management, and continuous improvement.

Creates exception-based dashboards, scorecards, and ad hoc reporting that allow leaders to move from enterprise results to zone, district, and store-level opportunities.

Develops and maintains recurring operational reporting, dashboards, and analysis beyond payroll and scheduling, including store performance, field execution, fulfillment activity, and other retail operations priorities.

Monitors labor expense and productivity measures, including labor hours, labor dollars, sales per labor hour, units per labor hour, payroll rate, overtime, schedule alignment, and workload completion.

Supports pilots involving labor deployment, scheduling, store processes, technology, operating hours, fulfillment, or customer service; defines measures, tracks results, and recommends next steps.

Serves as a subject matter expert for workforce planning, payroll budgets, scheduling analytics, reporting, and related store operations topics.

Manages recurring deliverables and responds to field and home office questions with timely, clear, and accurate guidance.

Cross-Functional Partnership

Partners with Store Operations and Field Leadership to understand operating realities and convert analysis into practical field actions.

Partners with Finance on labor budgets, forecasts, expense performance, reconciliations, and benefit validation.

Partners with Human Resources on scheduling policies, workforce considerations, and change management.

Works with Information Technology and workforce-management support teams on data, reporting, testing, system issues, and enhancements.

Preferred Qualifications & Education

Bachelor's degree in Business Analytics, Finance, Operations, Industrial Engineering, Economics, Statistics, Supply Chain, Business Management, or a related discipline; equivalent relevant experience considered.

Two or more years of experience in workforce management, retail analytics, labor planning, financial analysis, operations analysis, or a related field; multi-unit retail experience preferred.

Advanced Microsoft Excel skills, including formulas, pivot tables, lookups, data validation, structured models, and scenario analysis.

Experience analyzing large datasets from multiple sources and translating findings into practical recommendations.

Strong attention to detail, data integrity, problem solving, organization, prioritization, and time management.

Ability to manage recurring deliverables and multiple concurrent projects with different scopes, requirements, and partners.

Excellent written, verbal, presentation, and interpersonal communication skills across technical and nontechnical audiences.

Experience with Power BI, Tableau, SQL, Python, workforce-management, scheduling, timekeeping, payroll, or labor-planning is a plus.

Experience implementing or managing automated scheduling capabilities within a retail workforce-management system preferred; experience with Ceridian Dayforce is highly valued but not required.

Knowledge of retail labor forecasting, scheduling, productivity, workload measurement, omnichannel fulfillment, and common retail performance metrics is preferred.

Ability to travel periodically to stores or field locations based on business needs.

Physical Requirements and/or Environment

Office/cubicle or approved hybrid work environment.

Periodic work in store or field environments and travel based on business needs.