by Annabel Beales on 8 January 2026
This 4-part series, based on insights from Caffè Nero, William Hill, and The Entertainer, explores what’s changed and what winning adaptive workforce management strategies and 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 the retail and hospitality industries. 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 behind that pressure:
We’ll then look at why many teams are taking an adaptability-first approach to workforce management, 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 what comes next. Let’s dive in.
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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. |
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.
These patterns sit at the heart of today’s retail labour challenges: demand arriving in short, intense bursts that traditional staffing models simply weren’t built for.
For William Hill, overall volumes look similar on paper, but the work behind the counter has changed. 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 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.
Together, these shifts make demand more variable within the day and harder to predict using last year’s demographics, patterns, or intuition alone. 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.
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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Labour has become significantly more expensive – but budgets haven’t risen to match. 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. |
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.
With most teams not seeing equivalent budget uplifts, every hour now carries far more weight in operational costs. Businesses are working with fewer people than ever before – 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.
Demand, however, hasn’t dropped to meet the size of today’s teams, widening the gap between what’s needed and what’s affordable. 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.
These financial and staffing constraints create another challenge: 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 pressures detailed above often show up first on the people doing the work.
Andy Maynard was passionate that leaders can’t ignore the situation: he’s seen team members who “look broken”, and others worried about pushing already tired colleagues further. In smaller teams, 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; harming work-life balance, increasing fatigue, and reducing trust in scheduling decisions.
These retail and hospitality workforce trends can feel bleak, but they also explain why so many businesses are rethinking what good looks like in workforce management. It’s time to explore how operators are adapting to these realities and why flexible work is becoming essential for teams, performance, and sustainability.
Yesterday’s ways of working can’t keep pace with today’s demand patterns. Instead, retail and hospitality leaders are looking for operating models that can adapt quickly, protect service, and support the people delivering it.
Adaptability, in this context, means matching staffing to real demand instead of rigid expectations and making decisions based on live patterns, not last year’s assumptions. 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.
These priorities are showing up clearly in what teams consider good workforce management today. 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 and performance are now deeply connected.
There’s also a growing recognition that adaptability is about people. 81% of leaders said transformation succeeds when people, not technology, are equipped to drive it. Almost half (48%) believe trust is the biggest determinant of whether change sticks, and one in three cite manager adoption as critical.
Looking ahead to 2026, it’s clear that the brands with a competitive edge are the ones that can adapt quickly to what the day actually brings, not what last year’s template predicted.
It’s usually at this point that operators mention the value of working with an AI-powered workforce management partner such as Rotageek.
When automation highlights demand patterns early and removes the manual effort from rota updates, managers gain back time and control – turning what used to be a reactive week into a more structured one.
Seeing colleagues in tears because a shift has pushed them beyond their 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 many stepping back to rethink how they can optimise workforce management 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 demand.
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.
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