Five disciplines behind a fair store schedule

I treat the contract and the schedule as a single design problem. A contract promising 22 hours means little if scheduling rules let a manager offer those hours only when the colleague cannot work, and a rota published four weeks ahead helps nobody if late changes are routine. At Bralvinge we set three rules: contracted minimum hours for anyone who has worked regularly for six months, hours that can be scheduled across stores within a defined travel distance, and a record of every change made after a rota is published. Finance sees the cost of hours that do not match trading. Store managers see which changes keep recurring. Employees can see where their hours will come from. A fixed-hours model costs more than call-in labour in a quiet February, and I would rather show that cost openly than hide it in turnover.

Our year has three peaks: the spring home and garden season, the summer months in which Swedish employees are entitled to four consecutive weeks of leave, and Christmas. Each depends on temporary colleagues, many of them at school or university. I design younger workers' roles before deciding how many we need. Swedish work environment rules restrict minors from working alone where threats or violence are a risk and limit their late hours, so our scheduling system blocks those shifts automatically instead of relying on a manager's memory. Returning seasonal staff are invited back before we advertise, which shortens induction and gives store teams familiar faces. I also count how many summer workers later join on permanent contracts. A summer job is often the start of a retail career, and a large share of our store managers began exactly that way.

Our Swedish stores, Danish stores, warehouse and head office work under different collective agreements, with different unions and different habits of consultation. Swedish co-determination law requires us to negotiate with the union before significant changes, and I use that as a design stage rather than a formality: proposals reach union representatives while they can still alter them. In Denmark, pay and conditions rest on agreements rather than statute, and the shop steward inside each store carries real weight. As head of group labour relations I sit at the table for the most important negotiations and prepare the executive team for the others. I keep one register of the commitments made in each country, because an undertaking given in Örebro is read in Aarhus within a week, and an inconsistency there costs more trust than any single concession.

A Bralvinge store manager runs a business of about SEK 40 million a year with a team of roughly thirty, most of them part-time. Until 2024 many managed every one of those people directly. I judge leadership capacity through three figures: direct reports per store manager, stores per regional manager, and the hours a manager spends on administration someone else could do. Paid shift leaders now handle daily allocation and the first conversation about attendance, which leaves store managers time to coach and plan. Regional managers cover ten to twelve stores rather than seventeen. Each quarter I review store-manager sickness absence, turnover and internal promotion with our operations director. A manager's workload problem usually shows in those numbers months before it reaches sales, and by then the most capable managers have often already accepted offers elsewhere.

Sweden has long required employers to survey and document pay differences between women and men every year. The EU pay transparency directive adds pay ranges before interview, a ban on asking candidates about previous pay, and assessment of gaps within groups of work of equal value. I am building one job architecture across Swedish and Danish stores, the warehouse and head office, with about 140 roles in eleven levels. The hard part is not the grading method. It is explaining why a warehouse team leader and a store shift leader can sit at the same level while their collectively agreed scales differ, and deciding which differences we should close over time and which follow lawfully from separate agreements. Union representatives review the grouping before it is final. I would rather publish an honest explanation than a tidy table.