The perplexing argument against the rise of digital technology

You wake gently to an artificial simulation of daylight in your bedroom, timed perfectly to your sleep schedule, accompanied by the soft sounds of birds singing in nearby rustling trees. However, reality outside stands in stark contrast, as the sounds of nature are instead replaced by garbage trucks and ambulances – where the sun rarely braves the cold to show its face in moody London.

Then, simply by uttering the words “Good morning Alexa,” you signal the beginning of your personalised automated daily routine via voice recognition.

The lights in your bedroom brighten to full capacity after having lifted you peacefully from your slumber, your Spotify playlist ‘Morning Motivation’ begins playing throughout your home and your coffee begins to brew as you run a shower. You open an app that has pre-planned your outfits for the week as Alexa moves on to report the estimated time of arrival to work and the best public transport route before broadcasting the latest news podcast you’re subscribed to. You pre-order a second coffee to go from Starbucks, picking it up from the collection point on your way to the tube and avoid the line of commuters needing their caffeine fix.

You arrive early to work, scanning your fingerprint via a biometric terminal to clock into your office job where you jump straight into a virtual video meeting with colleagues in New York and Melbourne via a 70-inch conference room screen. You share your screens and map out workflows via the virtual whiteboard. Meanwhile, your smart watch vibrates and informs you that you need to begin making your way to your next meeting and you turn to your colleagues and remark:

“What on Earth would we do without technology?”

Our quick bite out of the big apple: a brief recap of the largest retail expo in the world from Jason Steuber, Head of Sales here at Rotageek.

LONDON, UK, 13th January 2020 - Rotageek are delighted to announce that we have joined forces with shared workforce platform, Catapult!

Our partnership with Catapult will help shift-managers at retail organisations to easily access a pool of high-quality vetted talent, enabling them to better match labour to demand, while Catapult takes care of all payroll and admin.

On why optimised scheduling is key to operational performance.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… or rather, what one might call Christmas. This story begins with two store managers in the crux of the busiest period in the retail calendar. Let’s call them Richard and Charles. Both manage very large and well-known storefronts for the same retail giant in West (Richard) and East (Charles) London.

At Rotageek, we create scheduling technology. Importantly, we’re trying to figure out how to make shift work fairer for employees (which will benefit employers, too!). In this article, I take a deeper look into what schedule fairness truly means. I also speak to Dan Chamberlain, Rotageek’s Head of Data Science, because really, fairness in scheduling is a delicate balance of logic and humanity, held together by data science.

With almost three million workers, the retail industry is the UK’s largest private sector employer. But retailers face a number of challenges when it comes to recruiting and retaining the best staff.

Experience is everything in retail right now. Online shopping offers the ultimate in convenience, meaning brands are using their bricks and mortar stores to provide a spectacular, immersive experience.

Flexible working* is trendy. There are countless articles telling employers that, if they want to attract millennials, they need to offer them flexibility. The reality is more nuanced. Stability is just as important for some members of staff.

Creating, editing and disseminating schedules can often feel like a time-consuming, hurried and reactive process. However, by utilising data-driven scheduling you can accurately forecast far into the future; empower employees to have greater input into their schedules; and be proactive in making important business strategy decisions.

The first step to productivity is efficiency. But so many businesses are held back by outdated processes and systems.

How can employee scheduling help? While it used to be simply a task on the to-do list of individual stores, today it’s a function that brings together a multitude of factors.