3 retailers. 5 myths. 1 honest conversation about workforce management

Workforce technology comes with big promises, and here's the good news: when you talk to the retailers actually living with it day to day, the real story is even better than the pitch. Not because everything went smoothly (it didn't all go smoothly, and nobody pretended it did), but because what they gained along the way turned out to be richer than just "the schedule got easier."

This conversation was part of The Shift 2026, Rotageek's customer event, and followed straight on from a keynote painting a picture of where the workforce is heading. This panel shows that future, already arrived, in three real businesses. 

Three UK retailers sat down for an honest, warm conversation about what actually happened when they made the leap to Rotageek's workforce management software.

Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager at Screwfix, live with Rotageek for just over a year and has already scaled to around 1,000 stores in roughly seven months.

Heather Ellis, Operational Excellence Lead at Pets at Home, a customer for close to eight years and using auto-scheduling for around five of those.

And Debbie Kitchen, Interim Head of Retail Operations Manager at The White Company, has been live for just over a year now, on her second attempt after an earlier system didn't go to plan, and she's glad she gave it another go with Rotageek's specialist software.

Moderated by independent consultant Joe Leith (and former Director of Retail Analytics at William Hill), the conversation focused on five myths leadership teams often carry into a workforce transformation. What you'll find below isn't a highlights reel glossing over the hard bits. It's something better: three retailers, at three different stages of the journey, telling you honestly what they learned, and why they'd still say it was worth it.

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Myth one: One system can solve every workforce challenge

Myth two: If the forecast is accurate, managers will follow it 

Myth three: Once the system is live, the hard work is done

Myth four: Better scheduling means fewer hours 

Myth five: The ROI from WFM is operational

The key takeaways

Myth 1: One system can solve every workforce challenge

No single generic platform can, but a specialist one can get close. Screwfix, Pets at Home and The White Company all run different scheduling logic for different parts of the business, including retail floors and appointment-based services, inside the same system, because it was built specifically for workforce complexity rather than bolted onto a broader HR platform. 

It's easy to assume the platform does all the heavy lifting. What all three panellists actually found was more encouraging: the technology gives you the foundation, and then you get to shape it around your own people and your own operation. That's a much better position to be in than hoping a piece of software will do your thinking for you.

For Ben Rodford, that meant being deliberate about how much to hand over to the system, and how much to keep as a human call:

 "It's easy to bring in a tool and think you just click a button and your schedules are produced, and that's it. How much autonomy and agency you've given your managers and staff to use it in the best way is something that really needs to be considered. How that tool fits into your system and your strategy is arguably more important than the software itself."
— Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix 

Debbie Kitchen agreed, and framed it as something to embrace rather than worry about. A great platform gives you a strong base to build from, even when retail throws curveballs at you:

 "If there was one system that could suddenly solve absolutely everything, it would be amazing. But retail is really complicated. A good platform is a great foundation, but you've still got a load of operational activity and curveballs to deal with."
— Debbie Kitchen, Interim Head of Retail Operations Manager, The White Company 

Heather Ellis shared her proof point for different necessary logic. Pets at Home runs two genuinely different workforces, and rather than forcing them into one mould, the platform simply flexed to fit both: 

 "We've got our retail stores, where we drive our rotas from transaction data. And then dog grooming salons, which are service-led and appointment-based, completely different logic. For retail we use auto scheduler, and for groomers it's self-made. I don't think we would ever find a one-size-fits-all solution."
— Heather Ellis, Operational Excellence Lead, Pets at Home 

The good news across all three: you don't need a perfect, all-knowing system. You need a flexible foundation, and the confidence to design around it in a way that actually fits how your business works. 

Myth 2: If the forecast is accurate, managers will follow it

Not automatically, and the best systems are designed with that in mind. Rather than forcing managers to accept a forecast blind, a specialist platform builds in room for local judgement, fixed contracts and personal commitments, so trust builds through use rather than instruction. 

Even the best demand forecast is only half the picture. The other half is real people, with real lives, and the retailers who got the most out of their platform were the ones who leaned into that rather than fighting it.

Heather Ellis put it beautifully: trust isn't something you demand, it's something you build, starting with an honest conversation about what the tool is really there for:

 "It's got to be at the very front of the conversation, to say it's a tool that can help you and really help our customers. But it's not there to make sure you're working every weekend, or on every single late shift."
— Heather Ellis, Operational Excellence Lead, Pets at Home 

Debbie Kitchen shared one of the most valuable lessons from her team's journey: even a technically accurate forecast needs a human check before it becomes a decision that affects someone's life. 

 "We've got so many people on fixed contracts that we've built up over the years, very tenured colleagues in our stores. Someone who may have worked for us for 20 years, who's the most outstanding seller, brilliant with customers, brilliant local customer base, but can't change their shifts. You don't want to lose that person because they're so valuable to your store, but they can't do a 12 to 4 shift on a Saturday; they can only work Monday to Friday. That's an example of where the system is technically right, but humanly wrong."
— Debbie Kitchen, Interim Head of Retail Operations Manager, The White Company 

That employee couldn't work the shift pattern the system had optimised for.

The White Company chose the person over the algorithm, and it's exactly the kind of judgement call that makes a workforce tool genuinely work well: powerful enough to do the maths, wise enough to know when to defer to someone who knows the team. 

Ben Rodford's experience showed the same idea from the other direction, and it's a lovely one: a good system earns trust the same way a good manager does, by getting to know you. 

"Previously, my manager has looked after me, knows I've got a yoga class on a Friday evening. Is the system going to know that? How much is my life going to change by bringing in the system?"
— Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix 

Screwfix cared so much about building that trust early that they leaned into it hard, almost too hard, as Ben admitted with a laugh: "We had this phrase, trust the system, trust the system, trust the system. For some people that went too far, it became: the system says this, so that's what you've got to do." The fix wasn't to trust the system less, it was to get clearer on which decisions deserved that trust, and which ones still deserved a human's judgement. 

Myth 3: Once the system is live, the hard work is done

No. Go-live is when a specialist system starts paying off, surfacing patterns, like a manager who hasn't worked a weekend shift in a month, that were invisible under spreadsheets. The retailers here are still tuning their systems a year or more in, and getting more value the longer they use it. 

All three panellists agreed on this more than anything else: go-live isn't a finish line, it's the moment the real, useful work can finally begin, because for the first time, you can actually see what's happening.

Ben Rodford, over a year into Screwfix's rollout, talked about this ongoing tuning with real energy, like a job that keeps getting more interesting rather than more tiring:

 "We're now thirteen months into this journey, and it's about what we're tweaking now, finding the balance between not having a rigid system that will inevitably be wrong sometimes, and making sure we've got enough staff for the tasks that are genuinely urgent."
— Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix 

For Debbie Kitchen, this visibility became one of the most valuable, almost delightful, parts of the whole change. Patterns that used to hide inside a stack of Excel files suddenly had nowhere to hide: 

 "It's fascinating when you go in and realise you've got a manager who hasn't worked a Saturday for three or four weeks. That's now the biggest piece of work for us: driving consistency and compliance, store by store."
— Debbie Kitchen, Interim Head of Retail Operations Manager, The White Company 

Heather Ellis offered the reassuring long view. Four years in, Pets at Home hasn't run out of things to improve, and that's exactly as it should be, because the business itself keeps growing and changing: 

"For years, we still have new managers getting promoted, people joining the business. It's continuously making sure everyone is brought in and knows the benefit of Rotageek, through every part of the business."
— Heather Ellis, Operational Excellence Lead, Pets at Home 

Put together, their experiences tell a genuinely hopeful story: the first year is about getting the basics right, and every year after that, you just keep getting better at it. Looking back on the whole journey, Debbie put it simply:

"It can be really challenging, and I wasn't apprehensive about this, but actually just how well everyone's got on with it. It's worked so well, it gives me faith going forward that we can do more."
— Debbie Kitchen, Interim Head of Retail Operations Manager, The White Company 

Myth 4: Better scheduling means fewer hours

Not always. The retailers here found the bigger win wasn't cutting hours, it was putting them in the right place: Screwfix freed up manager time for the shop floor, The White Company added hours where demand justified it, and Pets at Home reinvested the savings straight back into stores.  

It's tempting to build the whole business case around hours saved, because it's the easiest number to put in a slide. But all three retailers found something better than a cost saving: the confidence to put resource exactly where it earns its keep.

Heather Ellis was upfront that Pets at Home's original case did include time saved, but the real prize turned out to be growth, not just efficiency:

 "We knew our case would be built on the fact a manager can build a rota in fifteen minutes instead of an hour and a half. So yes, of course it can save hours. But actually, using an auto scheduler and having colleagues in the right places means we can serve customers and sell more. With more customers and more money, we then invest more hours into stores."
— Heather Ellis, Operational Excellence Lead, Pets at Home 

Debbie Kitchen's story took this even further, and it's a genuinely uplifting one. The White Company had already done the hard work of trimming hours themselves, so the system's job was simply to show them where extra investment would pay off: 

 "We didn't build the business case on 'if you save this many hours'; we'd already stripped a lot of hours out of our stores ourselves. Since we opened in Trafford Centre, we've actually put in more hours than before, because we've seen the demand is there."
— Debbie Kitchen, Interim Head of Retail Operations Manager, The White Company 

Ben Rodford's version was about what that freed-up time gets to become. At Screwfix, the goal was never to shrink the workforce, it was to give managers back the time to do the parts of the job only a person can do: 

 "Our branch managers are doing less time managing and more time serving customers, putting stock away, all the things that only a person can really do."
— Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix 

The genuinely good news here: efficiency doesn't mean less. It means more of the right thing, in the right place, at the right time. 

Myth 5: The ROI from WFM is operational

No, and this might be the best news of all: two of the clearest wins weren't in any business case. Over 90% of Screwfix colleagues installed the scheduling app on their own phones, unprompted, and Pets at Home built fairness rules directly into their scheduling logic. Both are signs the system earned trust and made people's working lives genuinely better, not just that it cut costs. 

If you only measure this against operational metrics, you'll miss the return that all three retailers said mattered most: how people actually feel about coming to work.

Ben Rodford shared a number nobody set out to measure, and it's a lovely one, real proof that people chose this for themselves:

"We had no idea what the uptake on the personal app would be. The measure we've got is in the mid-nineties. If I'm going to let this sit on my phone and intrude on my life through notifications, I'll only keep it if it's genuinely serving a purpose. It's not because it's saving the business money."
— Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix 

Debbie Kitchen's example was less a statistic and more a genuinely heartwarming picture of what's changed day to day: 

"We went from a very manual system, printing out rotas, sticking them in a plastic pocket on a notice board, managers taking a photo and sending it round on WhatsApp. Now I've got my schedule in my pocket. I can book my holiday sat at home with my other half, planning next year."
— Debbie Kitchen, Interim Head of Retail Operations Manager, The White Company 

Heather Ellis's example was about fairness, and it's a genuinely positive thing to be able to say out loud to your team: 

"We don't let colleagues work more than a certain number of nights in a week, because that's blocked in the tool. From a cultural and a people perspective, that's a really big return for us, one you'd never see written into the business case."
— Heather Ellis, Operational Excellence Lead, Pets at Home 

And for Heather, the real confirmation that it was the right call doesn't come from a dashboard at all, it comes from hearing it straight from the shop floor: 

"It's really great when you go on calls or hear them talk about the shifts they get, and how much they love the tool. Without that actual shop floor feedback, it's hard to know. But when you hear that, you think, okay, that was the right decision."
— Heather Ellis, Operational Excellence Lead, Pets at Home 

Ben Rodford's proudest moment made the same point in the most public way possible. Screwfix's implementation team was put forward for the company's Team of the Year award:

 "Our implementation team were put forward for team of the year award... and the branch managers vote on team of the year. Getting that feedback from branch managers to say, of all the things we've done this year, that's had the best impact on me and my team, that's it."
— Ben Rodford, Resource Planning and MI Manager, Screwfix 

Moderator Joe Leith put it best, and it's a lovely way to sum up the whole conversation: 

 "Workforce is probably the killer app for this kind of technology, because you don't just get to make the bottom line look better. You're actually making people's lives easier."
— Joe Leith, Independent Consultant, JL Workforce & Analytics Advisory 

The key takeaways

Here's the thing that stands out most from listening to Ben, Heather and Debbie: none of them pretended it was easy, and every single one of them would still say it was worth it.

Between them, they've covered every stage of this journey, from the first hard lessons to years of steady, ongoing improvement, and the honesty in how they told it is exactly what makes their story worth trusting.

If there's one thread running through all five myths, it's a genuinely hopeful one: the technology gives you the foundation, but the good stuff, the trust, the fairness, the time given back to people, comes from how thoughtfully you build on it. That part is always worth getting right. 

Pulling the five myths together, here's what actually held up under scrutiny:

• A specialist system beats a generic one, especially for complex operations. Pets at Home runs two genuinely different workforces, retail and grooming, in the same platform, because it was built to flex rather than force a single logic onto everything.
• Trust is built by people, not switched on by accuracy. The White Company's "technically right, but humanly wrong" moment shows why the best systems leave room for a manager's judgement, not just the data.
• Go-live is the start, not the finish. Screwfix is still tuning its approach thirteen months in, and Pets at Home is still onboarding new managers four years into auto-scheduling. The value compounds the longer you're live.
• Efficiency doesn't always mean fewer hours. The White Company added hours at its Trafford Centre store once the data showed the demand was there, proof that better scheduling is about precision, not just cost-cutting.
• The best ROI is often the one nobody measured going in. Over 90% of Screwfix colleagues installed the scheduling app on their own phones, unprompted, a stronger vote of confidence than any efficiency stat.

If any of this sounds like where your own business is, or where you're hoping to get to, it might be worth a conversation.