Chief Human Resources Officer / Europe
Three workforce decisions and what they cost
- Stores
- 138
- 112 in Sweden and 26 in Denmark, 2025
- Employees
- 4,200
- About 2,500 full-time equivalents; most store staff part-time
- Swedish store staff on call-in terms
- 14%
- December 2024, down from 41% in 2022
Decisions & consequences
01Replacing call-in hours with contracted minimums across 112 stores
In early 2022 about 1,310 of our 3,200 Swedish store colleagues, 41%, were employed on hourly call-in terms. Shifts were offered by text message, often two or three days ahead, and many worked close to full-time in December and almost nothing in February. Store turnover was 47% a year, and exit interviews kept returning to one complaint: people could not plan rent or childcare around us.
I proposed that everyone who had worked regularly for six months be offered a contract of at least 22 hours a week, with rotas published four weeks ahead. Ola Tjarnsved, our chief financial officer, estimated SEK 38 million a year in paid hours that would not match trading. Several regional managers argued that small stores would lose the ability to cover a sudden absence. Some students told us they preferred call-in work around their examinations.
We accepted higher cost and less managerial convenience. To limit idle hours, contracted hours became portable: a colleague could be scheduled in up to three stores within 25 kilometres, with travel time paid. Students could stay on call-in terms by their own written choice, and 310 did. We negotiated the change with the union under the co-determination procedure, which added three months but produced a scheduling clause both sides could defend.
By December 2024 the call-in share had fallen to 14%, and average contracted hours had risen from 19.5 to 26.8 a week. Store turnover fell to 33%. Payroll rose by 2.6% of the store wage bill, against Ola's estimate of 3.4%. Hours that did not match trading cost SEK 21 million in 2023 and SEK 9 million in 2024. Sales per paid hour fell 1.8% in the first year before recovering.
What I would change is the order of explanation. We described the multi-store rule after contracts were signed, and colleagues without cars at rural stores felt misled. Travel arrangements should have been settled store by store before anyone was asked to sign.
Barring under-eighteens from closing shifts in every store
On a Sunday evening in June 2019, a seventeen-year-old summer worker closed one of our Karlstad stores alone after her adult colleague went home ill. A man demanded the contents of the till. She handed over the cash, he left, and she was not physically hurt. The store manager had followed our scheduling practice; the practice itself depended on managers remembering the rules for minors and improvising when somebody fell sick.
Swedish work environment rules already restricted minors from working alone where threats or violence are a risk. I proposed going beyond our legal reading: nobody under eighteen would be scheduled on a closing shift or after 20:00 in any store, and every store would close with two adults present. Regional managers disagreed. Many small-town stores relied on summer workers for evening cover, and fewer places would mean fewer first jobs for local teenagers. The additional adult closing hours cost about SEK 7.4 million a year. Our chief executive supported the proposal after we took the incident to the board.
We made the rule technical rather than managerial: the scheduling system now refuses to place anyone under eighteen on a late shift. Young people bore part of the cost. Summer places for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds fell from 420 in 2019 to 260 in 2020. We then designed daytime roles in replenishment, seasonal displays and online-order picking, and joined municipal summer-job schemes in eleven towns. By 2023 places were back to 340.
No minor has been scheduled to close since the change. Of our 2022 summer workers, 46% returned the following year, and 61 former summer workers held permanent part-time contracts by 2024. The colleague in Karlstad is now a shift leader in the same store.
I would sequence the work differently. We cut summer places before the daytime roles existed, so a single summer absorbed the whole loss. The roles should have been ready first, and the number of places reduced only if they failed.
Narrowing store managers' spans by closing a head-office team
Our 2023 employee survey placed store managers as the least confident group in the company. Most managed every colleague in the store directly, as many as 26 people, without a paid deputy. Nine regional managers each covered between fourteen and seventeen stores. Store-manager sickness absence stood at 7.9% and annual turnover at 24%. When a store manager left we usually recruited externally, at a cost of about SEK 180,000 per appointment and roughly three months of weaker trading.
I proposed two changes for the Swedish stores, where the gap was widest; the Danish stores already had deputy managers. Every store would gain two paid shift leaders with a monthly supplement of SEK 2,400, taking daily allocation and first attendance conversations. Regional groups would rise from nine to twelve, each covering ten to twelve stores. To fund part of the cost, I proposed closing a head-office team of eleven store-support coordinators who prepared campaign instructions and checked display set-ups. Malin Ekvallius, our commercial director, opposed the closure, arguing that campaigns would be set up late and inconsistently. She was partly right.
The change passed through co-determination negotiations in early 2024 and took effect in May. Seven of the eleven coordinators moved into regional or shift-leader roles; four left with support from the collectively agreed transition fund. We trained 224 shift leaders over six months, although many started before their training was complete.
By the end of 2025 store-manager turnover had fallen to 15% and sickness absence to 6.1%. Direct reports per store manager fell to about eight, and two thirds of store-manager vacancies that year were filled internally. The net cost was SEK 11 million a year. Campaigns completed on time fell from 93% to 81% for two quarters and recovered only to 90%.
I underestimated what the coordinators did informally, including covering administration for store managers on leave. Next time I would map that unwritten work with the people doing it before deciding which roles to remove.