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TEAMS: Workforce Management, Leadership Engagement app
Problem: Identify employee flexibility
In retail stores, labor is planned around averages. When unexpected events—a delayed truck, holidays, weather— occur, managers may find they are over-staffed. Leaders need a way to identify employees willing to leave early without disrupting work on the floor.
In practice, leaders relied on informal methods:
• walking the floor and asking employees
• notes or by memory
• a whiteboard where employees checked their name
The whiteboard revealed a need: a visible way for employees to signal flexibility that leaders could see while on the floor.
Decision: create a digital opt-in
Inspired by the whiteboard, we explored a simple opt-in signal that employees could toggle via their shift in Schedule tool.
The feature used the term VTO (Voluntary Time Off)—a name that seemed intuitive given its similarity to PTO, but quickly broke down in practice. Early feedback revealed widespread confusion across employees, leaders, and partners. The name created a mental model that implied approval, policy, or compensation… none of which the feature supported.
Evidence of confusion
“Volunteer Time Off sounds like getting paid to volunteer.”
“How does an employee know if they’re approved?”
“You’re not technically taking time off.”
Choosing right terminology
I partnered with content design and surveyed retail leaders to compare alternative phrasing and understand which language best matched the intention of flexibility.
“‘Open to shorter shift’ feels the least like a request and more like an open invitation if it’s slow.”
A digital “raise your hand”
Employees access the Open to Shorter Shift toggle through a modal on every shift. The raised-hand icon, in both the employee experience and the Leadership Engagement app, indicates the employee has opted in. This gives leaders visibility while making labor decisions.
Outcome: Clear signals, better decisions
• Reduced misinterpretation by shifting the mental model from “time off” to a flexibility signal
• Improved clarity and timing for leaders making in-the-moment staffing decisions
• Established a shared language across partners and retail teams
Pilot learnings
• Leaders wanted visibility into who opted in first so they could support perceived fairness
• By pilot time, labor-market conditions had shifted and employees expressed needing more hours
• Tracking shortened shifts tied to opt-in signals proved difficult with existing data structures
Why this still mattered
While broader conditions limited long-term adoption, this effort clarified that language is part of the interaction model in operational tools. Reframing the feature from “time off” to availability and flexibility aligned expectations, reduced confusion, and helped the team avoid scaling a misleading mental model.