Conversation with…Rory Graham
Here we chat with workforce management specialist Rory Graham about his incredible career in the US and UK, working with retailers such as Walmart, Asda, Index and Littlewoods. We also discuss new developments in workforce management and how they might impact the future of retail operations.
You’ve had an amazing career in retail. How did you get into it? What drew you to the industry?
I’m afraid it’s quite a boring story! My parents owned a couple of newsagent shops in Dumfries, Scotland, so you could say my first foray into retail was in my pram. I grew up around retail and worked in the family business from a young age. However, some good advice from my dad was not to go into the family business, so I took a different path.
I started with Woolworths in Dumfries for a few years before moving to the Littlewoods organisation, where I worked in Index. I worked my way up from the stockroom and office to store manager roles, and eventually into Index’s head office, where I ended up in as Head of Central Operations before the business was acquired by Argos. It was a difficult time as some stores transitioned while others closed, but it was a great learning experience. From there, I was fortunate to join Asda, which eventually led me to Walmart.
Never Miss a Retail Update!When you moved to Walmart in the US, was it a culture shock? What was the transition like?
Moving from Yorkshire to small-town Middle America – Bentonville, Arkansas – was a big change, though not as dramatic as moving to New York or Los Angeles. Bentonville is Walmart’s global headquarters, but it still has that small-town feel. That said, I had worked closely with Walmart for years at Asda and had already travelled frequently to Bentonville, and to Canada and Africa for work, so the transition was relatively smooth.
Originally, we planned to stay for three years, but we ended up staying for ten! We really settled in and found it to be a lovely place to call home.
You’ve worked extensively in the US, but now you’re back in the UK, advising retailers on improving their workforce management. From a retail perspective, were the challenges in the US different from those in the UK?
Retail is very similar around the world – it’s all about delivering great customer service, looking after your employees, and ensuring a great shopping experience. The fundamental principles remain the same, but there are some differences. For example, the US still has hand-cut deli counters, which are less common in the UK. Also, payroll structures differ – US associates start at a lower hourly rate with incremental increases based on tenure, whereas the UK has a more standardised pay structure.
Another key difference is legislation. In the UK, labour laws are uniform nationwide, making workforce planning easier. In the US, every state has different regulations around scheduling, overtime, and workforce management. That means you can’t implement a single set of policies across all locations – you need to tailor them to each state’s legal framework.
One of the biggest logistical challenges in the US is the scale – delivery trucks can be on the road for two to three days, which is very different from the UK, where deliveries are more localised.
Given all these differences, what do you think each country does better in terms of workforce management and scheduling?
It’s hard to say whether one is better than the other – it’s more about trade-offs. In the UK, having a consistent set of labour laws makes it easier to create fair policies. In the US, the state-by-state approach allows for flexibility but creates complexity.
At Walmart, we tried to balance this by setting company-wide policies that went beyond the minimum legal requirements. For example, some states mandated only a short gap between shifts, while others mandated a longer period. Instead of following the lowest standard, we set our policy to ensure fairness and stability for associates across the company.
However, some regulations in places like Oregon and Chicago made scheduling difficult. If a store changed a shift at the last minute due to an unexpected truck delay or weather issue, they had to pay associates extra compensation. While the intent behind these policies is to provide stability for workers, they can sometimes make retail operations difficult to manage.
Interestingly the Employment Rights Bill, which is before parliament now, aims to address zero-hour contracts and will introduce some of the same penalties for late changes to shifts. Businesses in the UK will also need to start tracking colleagues actual hours in greater detail to ensure contracts are reflecting what people consistently work in the future, if the legislation goes ahead.
With so many regulations and moving parts, how did Walmart manage workforce planning across multiple states? Did you rely on tech solutions?
The key is using a strong scheduling and workforce management system and there are many great systems out there. Typically, they start by helping you to really define your process and forecasting the volume of work that your customers will need, to determine how many people you need each day. These systems then integrate labour laws, company policies, and business needs into scheduling, making compliance much easier.
One advantage of these systems is that they allow for “hard” and “soft” rules. Hard rules are legal requirements that cannot be overridden, whereas soft rules are company policies that can be adjusted when necessary. For example, if an associate prefers a four-day working week but is willing to work a fifth day in an emergency, the system allows for that flexibility while keeping the manager informed.
For businesses that don’t use advanced scheduling systems and still rely on Excel or paper schedules, adapting to new labour laws can be much more difficult and riskier.
You’ve seen retail evolve from the Index days to Walmart and now back at Asda. With AI and automation becoming more prevalent, where do you think workforce management is headed?
AI will play a huge role in the future of scheduling and workforce management, but I don’t believe it will completely take over. Retail is a people business, and human managers will always be needed to lead teams and ensure great customer service.
AI will, however, help make scheduling smarter and more predictive. For example, AI can analyse patterns – if an employee frequently swaps or calls in sick for a specific shift, the system can learn from that and avoid scheduling them at that time in the future. AI-driven scheduling should eventually become so accurate that managers won’t need to make as many adjustments.
But at the end of the day, a good manager always knows something that the system doesn’t. Maybe an associate technically says they’re available five days a week, but they prefer not to work on Thursdays. AI can help optimise scheduling, but there will always be a need for human oversight.
What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned about managing a workforce, and how have you applied these lessons in your role as a workforce optimisation advisor?
I feel very fortunate to have been a part of some of the very best workforce management teams around. We are lucky that our work gets to influence the customer, by having the right people available to serve them however they want. We influence the colleague experience by helping them get the shifts they need to support their families and finally we influence the business and the shareholder by effectively controlling the cost of our wages.
I think it’s important to remember it’s cost control and not just cost cutting; we want to drive productivity and support our business by investing the wage budget where it can be most effective for growing sales, and customer and colleague satisfaction. The wage budget is most likely the biggest controllable cost that a store manager must manage, and we need to provide them with the best possible tools, insights and support to manage their people and costs effortlessly.
Our colleagues are one of our most valuable assets and we need to understand what they want from us as a business and help them achieve that. A satisfied colleague is likely to be an effective and productive colleague and a great ambassador for our business.
We should take time to create and understand colleague personas. We may have a group who want full time work, students looking for weekend and evening work, and people who are just looking for part time work to complement their time with their families. We need a scheduling strategy within our workforce management platform to focus on the needs of all our colleague personas.
Can you share some exciting developments in workforce management that you’re currently exploring or advising your clients on, and how you think they’ll impact the future of retail operations?
We are regularly hearing a lot about advances in machine learning and AI and the application of these technologies is often complex and not easy to explain to our store teams. For me it’s important to be able to use the new logic in the background and keep the store facing elements simple and easy to understand.
At the heart of these new technologies is data and the ways that we can better use it going forward. We can now source bigger and more diverse data sets, and we can process that data much more quickly than we could in the past and that’s powerful.
With better and more frequent forecasts we can demonstrate improved accuracy and negate a manager’s compulsion to edit the forecast. With more powerful near time forecasts, we can fine tune the workload requirements right up to the week and even the day that it is needed, making things much better for the customer. We can also run our labour models using the prior days actual data and find out what our productivity was based on our actual sales and stock received, helping us drive sales and measure profitability.
Finally, we can use broader data sources to understand the manager’s behaviour when editing a schedule and pre-empt that, meaning that colleagues will get a schedule that is based on their behaviour such us the shifts they commonly pick up or swap.
As we look at the current economic climate with the changes to minimum wage and NIC coming in April and further changes to packaging and waste regulations on the horizon, as well as the new Employment Rights Bill, it will be increasingly important for retailers to fully understand their employment costs and the impact of every small change.
By having a detailed bottoms up model in place, they will be able to simulate process change and understand the true cost implications for their three- and five-year plans. The big benefit will be the ability to fully evaluate all innovations and drive cost control through process change and simplification rather than bluntly cutting colleague hours. This is sustainable wage planning and will be powered by the new technologies that handle big data sets well and provide quick answers for the business.
The other area that is going to be key in the future is the user experience for the frontline worker, whether it is the manager no longer sitting in front of a PC to manage schedules or the colleague viewing and interacting with their schedule on the sales floor.
Really digging into the manager and colleague personas will help us design solutions that deliver all their needs directly to their chosen mobile device. The more time that we can spend on the shopfloor with our colleagues and customer, the better it is for the business.
Returning to your career, have there been any mentors or leaders who’ve really inspired you?
Definitely. However, it is not fair to single out individual people because so many have influenced me at every stage of my career. The common theme though is a passion for the colleague and the customer, my biggest influencers all had these pillars at the heart of their management style. Listening and learning from our colleagues and customers will always help us build better processes and ultimately ensure that the business moves forward.
And lastly, a more personal question… you’ve now settled back in the UK. Can you tell us more about that?
My wife and I are based in North Yorkshire, well positioned for the trips to London and the south as well as being easy to get back up to our original homeland, Scotland. Our daughter got married this past year and she and her husband have also moved to North Yorkshire. We relocated our two large dogs from the US to the UK last year and that was one of the most stressful things we have ever done, and we do wonder if they bark with American accents!
