Flex work: schedule the role, not the person

The problem

In a Best Buy store, each department was locked to one person and one job code. An employee hired into home theater couldn't pick up a shift in mobile, at the store across town, with Geek Squad, or in a warehouse. Every holiday meant a wave of seasonal hiring, followed by a wave of goodbyes. The packaged scheduling, learning and HR systems couldn't do anything else, and the team that ran them managed vendors rather than building product.

What I saw

Schedule the role, not the person.

If a shift belongs to a role, anyone who has earned that role can fill it, wherever they've said they're willing to work. The flexibility had to live in the systems before it could live in the stores.

What I built

• A services layer around the packaged systems: new microservices that combined scheduling, learning, employee and sales data to do what the vendor platforms couldn't do on their own. I brought Agile product practices to a team that had run vendor platforms.
• Learned-and-earned roles: an employee completes the training, a leader approves it, and the role belongs to the employee, not to their job code.
• Scheduling by role: shifts open to anyone who has earned the role, at the locations they choose. The walls came down in order: nearby stores, then Geek Squad and retail in the same building, then warehouses.
• An employee app: clock in and out, set availability, swap and pick up shifts, and complete daily wellness checks, with screens that changed by person, role and shift.
• Employee delivery: when stores closed in 2020, employees who earned the parcel delivery role began delivering online orders to customers' homes, more than 1 million units in the first year. See Employee Parcel Delivery.

The result

• In August 2020, Best Buy's CEO described a flexible workforce model "that leverages technology," with skills-based training giving employees more scheduling eligibility, and store employees making same-day deliveries from 200 stores.
• In November 2020, she said store employees could become certified to perform tasks outside their primary job, that an associate wanting more hours could grab an extra shift making deliveries, and that employees would soon take shifts at different store locations.
• In February 2021, Best Buy reported that its employees had delivered more than 1 million units.
• In May 2021, Best Buy's CEO said: "Early results are showing us that once employees add skills, they tend to drive a higher customer NPS."
• In March 2022, Best Buy said 80% of its associates were skilled to support multiple jobs inside and outside its stores.

What I learned

Flexibility is a property of the system before it's a policy. A company can't offer people more roles until its systems stop tying one person to one job.