Ready for anything, or left behind? The workforce trends reshaping retail & hospitality

Adaptability is the new competitive advantage in retail and hospitality – and that means rethinking how you manage your workforce.

As customer behaviour shifts, labour shortages persist, and costs rise, planning teams are under more pressure than ever to respond quickly and accurately.

This 4-part series, based on insights from Caffè Nero, William Hill, and The Entertainer, explores what's changed and what winning adaptive staffing strategies and workforce planning initiatives look like in practice.

“We were sat in an all-inclusive holiday, luxury setting… but they were clearly 30% short on people. One morning I watched a young team member walk across the room in tears from the pressure she was under”.

Scenes like this one, relayed by Andy Maynard, IT Director at Caffè Nero, at a recent Rotageek panel, are now uncomfortably familiar across retail and hospitality companies. They reflect a sector where demand is unpredictable, teams are stretched, and the day-to-day reality no longer resembles the models many businesses are still planning against.

This first blog explores the retail and hospitality workforce trends and emerging trends behind that pressure:

• shifting customer behaviour, 
• rising labour costs, 
• tighter budgets, 
• and the growing human impact when work patterns don’t match what’s happening on the ground.

We'll then look at why many teams are taking an adaptability-first approach to staffing and why it's increasingly what sets successful teams apart from the rest.

BAU may not be coming back – but there's a better way to plan for the future and what comes next. Let's dive in.

Want to read the rest of the series? Click below:

Blog 2 - From paper rotas to live data: scheduling software in action

Blog 3 - Why workforce management change fails: 5 challenges to solve

Workforce trend: changing customer behaviour

Customer journeys are shorter, faster, and more intentional

Customer behaviour in retail and hospitality has shifted from browsing-led visits to purpose-driven interactions, with customers expecting faster service and fewer friction points.

Our panellists described customer experience as having changed for good. In the retail sector, people visit stores less often and with more purpose. In the hospitality sector, guests switch between walk-in, app, and delivery models, reshaping when, where, and how work happens.

Retail footfall is declining while service intensity increases

Retail stores are seeing fewer in-person visits overall, but higher service intensity during peak moments as customers compress activity into shorter timeframes.

At The Entertainer, Reward Manager Indre Lapiene describes in-person time on the shop floor as having “fallen massively”. Many customers now arrive to collect online orders or buy something they've already researched, reducing browsing and compressing activity into short, intense service windows.

Traditional workforce planning models no longer match demand patterns

Traditional workforce planning models were built for predictable, evenly distributed demand and struggle to cope with short, high-intensity service spikes.

These patterns sit at the heart of today's retail labour challenges and expose the limits of traditional workforce planning: demand arriving in short, intense bursts that traditional staffing models simply weren't built for.

Role complexity is increasing across retail and hospitality

Many frontline roles now combine customer service, technical oversight, compliance responsibilities, and skilled trades that did not previously sit within the same job profile.

For William Hill, overall volumes look similar on paper, but the work behind the counter has changed, creating a growing skills gap between traditional roles, skilled trades, and today’s operational demands.

As Thomas George, Head of Business Insight, explained, customers are “moving towards gaming rather than sports books”, which means fewer customer-facing conversations but far more complexity: machines to manage, compliance to track, and an environment that needs constant oversight.

Hospitality demand is fragmented across multiple channels

Hospitality workers are seeing the same pattern through a different lens. Caffè Nero now operates multiple touchpoints simultaneously – walk-ins, app orders, delivery – each pulling labour in a different direction. As Andy put it, customers can choose “whichever operating model they want to engage with”, and on-demand managers respond in real time.

Demand variability is increasing within the day

Together, these shifts make demand more variable within the day and harder to predict, increasing the need for scenario planning in workforce planning. Busy no longer looks like a queue at the till; it's shaped by channel mix, customer expectations, digital orders, and the trade-offs managers make when multiple demands hit at once and rotas can't keep up.

Operational pressure builds when rotas can’t adapt

This mismatch is where operational pressure begins – and it's this pressure that now collides with rising costs and tighter budgets.

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Workforce trend: financial and people pressures colliding

Labour costs are rising faster than workforce budgets

Labour has become significantly more expensive – but budgets haven't risen to match, leaving employers under increasing pressure. At the same time, many teams are operating with fewer people than they need; a combination that's forcing leaders into increasingly tough trade-offs.

Wage increases are reshaping labour economics

Over the last four to five years, the National Living Wage has increased by roughly 40% – a change which both Thomas and Andy called out as one of the biggest pressures facing operators today.

Each labour hour now carries greater financial risk

With most teams not seeing equivalent budget uplifts, every hour now carries far more weight in operational costs.

Labour shortages are limiting organisations’ ability to fill positions

Businesses are working with fewer people than ever before, with labour shortages now a defining constraint across retail and hospitality and the hiring process offering little immediate relief when teams are trying to fill positions quickly.

The UK has a hospitality staffing shortage, with the industry having lost 170,000 roles in the last year, while vacancies in retail in 2025 dropped significantly, suggesting that retailers are not replacing leavers with other job seekers.

Staffing gaps persist even as demand remains high

Demand, however, hasn't dropped to meet the size of today's teams, leaving talent gaps that compound existing labour shortages. As Andy put it, “there's just no more juice to squeeze out of that lemon”, yet the expectation to stretch labour budgets even further keeps coming.

Lean teams reduce workforce planning flexibility

These financial and staffing constraints create another challenge for workforce planning, as limited resources make it harder to respond when unexpected demand arrives. Coverage becomes harder to adapt when unexpected demand arrives.

Overly lean teams struggle to absorb spikes, fixed templates don't redistribute hours easily, and the pressure lands on the people on shift. That downstream impact is becoming impossible to ignore, and it's the human side of this story we turn to next.

The human impact

Andy Maynard was passionate that leaders can't ignore the situation: he's seen employees and team members who “look broken”, and others worried about pushing already tired colleagues further. In smaller teams, already stretched by labour shortages, even small gaps in the rota can ‘get very emotional, very quickly’.

These patterns affect retention - and smaller teams make each departure harder to absorb, deepening the skills gap left behind when experienced people leave and putting further strain on work life balance for those who remain.

These pressures trends can feel bleak, but they also explain why so many businesses are rethinking what good looks like in practice, including how they support skills development and training alongside day-to-day delivery.

It's time to explore how operators are adapting to these realities and the crucial role flexibility now plays in teams, performance, and sustainability.

Why adaptability is now a competitive advantage

Traditional operating models can’t keep pace with modern demand

Yesterday's ways of working can't keep pace with today's demand patterns - especially when labour shortages reduce the margin for error for retail and hospitality organisations. Instead, retail and hospitality leaders are looking for operating models that can adapt quickly, protect service, and support the people delivering it.

Adaptable workforce planning aligns staffing to real demand

Adaptability, in this context, means workforce planning that matches staffing to real demand and evolving market demands, with a sharper focus on both service and people - instead of rigid expectations and making decisions based on live patterns, not last year's assumptions.

Demand now fluctuates by hour, not just by day or week

It reflects an understanding that busy now looks different for every business – and sometimes for every hour of the day. Stability now depends on the ability to adapt to disruption.

Workforce management success is measured across cost, service, and people outcomes

These priorities are showing up clearly in what teams consider good workforce management today, as teams balance cost control, service quality, and wider business goals. Cost control remains front and centre, with 41% of leaders identifying it as their primary measure of success.

Forecast accuracy follows closely at 35%, as operators work to match hours more precisely to real demand. Another 18% point to retention and wellbeing, recognising that people experience, benefits, and performance are now deeply connected.

Adaptability depends on people, not just technology

There's also a growing recognition among employers that adaptability is about people - and about creating the conditions for continuous learning as roles and demands evolve. 81% of leaders said transformation succeeds when people, not technology, are equipped to drive it - and when teams are given the right environment to adapt.

Trust and continuous learning determine whether change succeeds

Almost half (48%) believe trust is the biggest determinant of whether change sticks, with progress depending on manager adoption, confidence, and long-term commitment - alongside promoting continuous learning seen as key to building confidence during change.

Competitive advantage in 2026 will come from real-time adaptability

Looking ahead to 2026, it's clear that the brands with a competitive edge - and the ability to stay ahead - are the ones that can adapt quickly to what the day actually brings, not what last year's template predicted.

AI-powered workforce tools enable faster, more confident decisions

It's usually at this point that operators mention the value of working with an artificial intelligence–powered partner such as Rotageek.

When automation and new technologies highlight demand patterns early and remove the manual effort from rota updates, managers gain back time and control, improving productivity and turning what used to be a reactive week into a more structured one.

Today's state of play is unsustainable

Seeing colleagues in tears because labour shortages have pushed shifts beyond sustainable limits shouldn't be part of working life in retail or hospitality businesses. As Andy put it, “There has to be some kind of reset as far as I'm concerned... the right person at the right time, in the right place is more important than ever now.”

That reset is already underway for many operators, with companies stepping back to rethink how they can optimise workforce planning for today – not just for service levels, but for the top talent holding everything together.

In the next blog in this series, we'll look at how adaptive workforce systems help turn that reset into everyday reality, giving teams a more flexible, sustainable way to meet future demand.

For retail and hospitality teams, the ability to adapt planning in real time is no longer optional - it’s central to resilience, performance, and long-term sustainability.

This blog is part of our Ready for Anything series, built on insights from William Hill, Caffè Nero, and The Entertainer. Download the full report to explore the full set of findings and discover how teams are using Rotageek to turn workforce volatility into smarter, fairer rotas.

👉 Download the workforce transformation report