Name: Your Labor Plan is Lying to You–Here’s How to Fix It
Uploaded: 2026-04-29T17:00:47.605Z
Duration: 29 min 24 s
Description: Your Labor Plan is Lying to You–Here’s How to Fix It

Transcript for "Your Labor Plan is Lying to You–Here’s How to Fix It": Hello, everyone, and welcome to the OurLegion and Connors Group webinar, Your Labor Plan is Lying to You. Here's How to Fix It. My name is Riley O'Dowd. Before we get started, I just wanted to go over some general housekeeping items. You can see the chat, docs, and q and a on the right. We have people already engaging with the chat. We'd love to, say hello and where you're from. There's a few resources that you can download or access throughout the session. And then if you do have any questions, we would love for you to ask them in the q and a. We will we reserve time at the end to answer those. If we run out of time, we will answer those via email to you directly. If you have any technical issues, let us know in the chat, and I will assist you. And, finally, a replay of the webinar will be sent out afterwards via email so you can watch, rewatch, and share with your teams if you're interested. And so now that we have that out of the way, I'm excited to have Wes Danfield from Connors Group come up on stage and provide a little bit of industry perspective around the labor planning before we jump into the demo. Perfect. Thank you, Riley, and thank you for, the housekeeping getting us started. So I'm really excited to, join the webinar today. I was actually in a, executive briefing last week with, one of the largest retailers in the world last week and got introduced as the, the workforce management nerd in the room. So discussing this subject today is really fitting for me. So let's discuss what we mean by labor planning and how it's aligned to you. And first, I think we need to start with what is that labor plan. So labor plan can be called multiple things, your labor plan, your labor budget, maybe payroll. At the end of the day, when we talk about your labor plan, we're talking about that line in your p and l that accounts for paying your for your workforce, the wages you pay your associates. In a corporate environment, this is this is really easy as it tends to be based on the number of headcount by department, by role, that org structure, and how it rolls up. But this can be really challenging when we talk about the workforce. I know this firsthand. I lived this in my life. I was in your shoes most likely where I own this line in the p and l. And now at Connors, I help a lot of a lot of clients, find ways to manage this line day to day, this p and l line, help them manage it. But at Conners, we see labor differently. We see this line in your P and L, not as a liability, but as your greatest asset. It's your people. So I was, I was, head of stores for a while, and I had a mentor, and they came to me and said, you know, what is the most important square foot in your store? And my mind was racing. Like, I'm sitting there thinking, okay. What's the highest margin? Is it the register itself? Like, what what drives our business? What's that most important square foot in my store? And she very quickly corrected me. It's the square foot that's between your associate and your customer. And that's where, Conners, we believe starting with a clear vision, you can create a great place to work for your so associates, which becomes a great place to shop and ultimately a great place to invest. The core of that is your associate, your greatest asset. Unfortunately, many organizations only see this p and l line as your largest controllable expense. Looking for anything they can do to reduce or cut it just to save some money. This line in the p and l is intensely scrutinized. So how is it lying to you? I think of two ways that this lies to you. First, you likely have a great workforce management solution like Legion running your week to week operations. But how is that performing to the budget you made at the beginning of this year? The problem is the budget. In most cases, it is made at the highest level. Store ops, corporate ops, corporate finance, they usually come up with some kind of number. They're projecting the following here. Here's the sales. Here's the shrink. Here's the labor plan. And then they force that down on operations or store ops finance to figure out how are we gonna hit this number. How are we gonna hit this high level number with our day to day operations? We call this the tops down, bottoms up approach, where you're left at this high high level top line number. You have no idea how you will achieve and still give your stores what they need to run their business. There's a disconnect how we manage the day to day versus the budget. And this gets me to my second reason why it's lying. You're using an archaic system to manage this line. In our analysis, looking at NREF's top retailers, most are using a homegrown solution to manage this line. There really hasn't been a system out there to support running a labor plan for a full year. There are amazing solutions like Legion that help you run your day to day, week to week business. You're likely making schedules a couple weeks in advance, and with Legion, it's continuing to get more and more accurate. But how is this week to week performance performing to that current plan that you made beginning of this year? How do you plan to make the next fifty two week plan this following fall as fall is typically is the budget season for most businesses? This is where I'm really excited to see Legion's labor planning tool today. It closes both of those gaps. If you were to use it today, stand it up today, run it today, even if you don't have Legion WFM, if you were to run it today, you would know where you're gonna miss the back half of this year. Are you gonna make your labor plan for this coming holiday? And if you run it today, you will be more strategically prepared when making that plan for the next fiscal year. Legion's labor planning tool well, that's a tongue twister. Legion's labor planning tool is using the same to same week to week operation, the same solution you use week to week, but running it for a full year. It's all integrated. It's all one product. This this way, when finance gives you that tops down number this fall, you can truly build that bottoms up based on how you operate week to week. Now let's be honest. Is there going to be a gap? Yes. It's not a perfect world, people. We wish there wouldn't be, but you know there will be a gap. But at least this forces the conversation to find ways to close that gap ahead of time versus in this current year where your plan and your weekly operations are likely lying to each other. So this is where I'm really excited to hand it over to Mikaela to give us a demo of this solution. Okay perfect. Thank you, Wes. So I am actually just going to dive right in here. Amazing intro of what labor planning is as a whole from Wes. So now I'm going to take just a moment here to kind of ground us in how Legion approaches labor planning because this is really where we connect strategy all the way down to execution. So at the highest level, we think about labor planning across the three layers that you see here, strategic, operational, and tactical. And the key is that they're not disconnected. They are all working off of the same data foundation. So we're actually going to start on the right side of the screen here on the strategic side because this is where organizations are making longer term decisions. So this is things like growth, expansion, workforce transformation. Lead Gen provides a unified data model so that these decisions aren't happening in a vacuum. You are basing them on actual demand patterns. You're basing them on your actual labor performance, your company's specific labor drivers, business drivers. And so that then flows into the operational level. So the operational level is where this really becomes actionable. Actionable. This is where you can start acting on your plans. So this is going to be things like your annual labor plan, your budgets. This is how your labor gets allocated week to week or period to period. And what's important here is that in Legion, those budgets are not static. They are tied directly to real labor demand, and they can be enforced during execution. So as Wes mentioned, you're not just planning labor, you're actually managing to it with lead gen. And then finally, that takes us to tactical level. And from the tactical level, this is where all of this comes to life in the schedule. So lead gen does enable interval level staffing so that you're aligning labor precisely to demand throughout the day, not just at that high level. We're at that level that finance is trying to push on to us. So this is what allows us to hit those finance goals, to hit those service goals, while you're still staying on budget. And the real value is that these layers are all connected. Strategic decisions inform operational plans, operational plans, then guide execution, and then the actual performance feeds back into the system so we are continuously improving future planning. And so that's how legion turns planning from more of a static exercise that a lot of you are probably familiar with today into something that's dynamic, data driven, and executable. So now that I've talked about this, I'll go to the next slide where we are going to focus more into the five key business outcomes we typically see and we consistently see with legions labor planning. So the first at the top of the screen here is going to be a defensible labor plan. So what that means is this isn't just a top down top down guess. This is something that's built from your real data. It's built from your real demand. It's looking at your productivity. Productivity. It's looking at your wage assumptions. So when finance or on the other side operations ask how did you get to this number, this is not feasible for us. We actually have clear data backed answers to these questions that we consistently get today. And then secondly, that takes us to our weekly allocation guardrails. So instead of just setting an annual target and hopping on your teams to stay on track, Legion is actually going to break that down into weekly or period level targets aligned to your specific fiscal calendar. So that's actually going to give your operators something actionable that they're managing against. And then third is going to be scenario modeling, and it's scenario modeling before commitment, and this is a huge one because whether it's changes to your wages, your volume, your productivity, those really high impact, high velocity changes that you see occurring midweek, mid quarter, mid period, you can actually test those scenarios in a live production environment in advance and understand the impact before you're actually locking in a plan and sending out to your field. So this key number three is really going to remove a lot of the risk from decision making that you're likely having to make today. And then fourth is going to be rolling reforecasting. So we live and breathe that plans should not be static. From a scenario modeling and rolling reforecasting perspective, we want to make sure that as the business changes, Legion allows you to change with the business. It allows you to continuously adjust so you can course correct before you miss your targets not after. And then finally, we have governance and controls. And this is key to any feature, any system because what makes this whole process scalable is that things like versioning, tracking assumptions, role based access, we are ensuring that the right people are making the right decisions, and we have full transparency into what those decisions are. And to kind of tie this slide up, the reality is most organizations, most of you today, might do one or two of these things really well. You might be really great at one and three, but struggle with four and five. We rarely see customers doing all of these five together, and that's where Legion is different because Legion is going to bring all of this into a single connected planning process. And so to move to our next slide here, bringing this all together, what makes Bijan different is this isn't a set again of disconnected steps. It's a continuous system from execution all the way back through. So it is going to start with forecast. You're going to be predicting demand in Legion. Legion is then going to automatically convert that demand into labor. We then translate that into, translate that volume into hours and the roles you actually need. And that isn't just going to live there. It's not just going to be used for scheduling. That's actually going to feed directly into your annual budget as well, which then gets broken down into those weekly allocations. So at this point of the process, you already have a clear and time phased target that your business or each of your scopes of business can manage against. And then from there, we of course move into scheduling guardrails. So this is where your plans become enforceable. We're actually ensuring our schedules themselves that are built and fully optimized within Legion are built in alignment with those labor targets and not drifting away from them or not feasible or not not feasible to actually manage and schedule to. And then, of course, we have execution. So this is what's actually happening in the field. And that kind of subsequently and naturally flows into monitoring variance because if you are over plan or under plan, you're able to see that and adjust to that in real time, which then leads us to that final piece which is that dynamic reforecasting. So as you are seeing your actual operational realities, as things are happening, as things are occurring throughout the fiscal period, throughout the year within your business, you can continuously readjust. And just to kind of sum this up, running across the bottom of the screen that we see here is that executive control layer. So this is going to be everything from governance to constraints and enforcement. So this is what allows organizations to do things like scenario modeling or to adjust your forecast monthly or even weekly, quarterly, and make those in your corrections. Because we are still maintaining control through permissions and through structured overrides without ever losing that baseline. So this is truly a continuous and closed loop system where planning and execution are always connected. So this is ultimately how Legion helps organizations not just plan labor, but still meet your baseline and still deliver on those plans. So very high level overview of lead gen, of how we help with labor planning, of how we make this a reality, within the system itself for our organizations. And with that, I am actually going to show and make this come to life for you guys within the environments as well. So I am going to share my screen here and we are going to see a live look at the labor planning module within Legion. So starting on the screen here, just a very quick kind of lay of the land. We are currently in what we consider our labor planning workspace. So this is where you could see last quarter's labor plan, you could see some upcoming maybe Q2, Q3 plans that are in progress, but let's focus in on our FY 2026 plan two. So we'll click on view here And what that's going to do is it's instantly going to take us to this overview screen that we see here where we're able to analyze our different what if analysis, analyze our different scenarios. So we can see here that scenarios four through six, they're still in progress. Maybe we're making some changes for holidays. Maybe we're making some changes to our federal minimum wage updates and seeing how that subsequently impacts our demand or guidance. But we already have scenarios one through three that are either completed or maybe they already been reviewed and approved as well by our higher ups. So from here we are able to just in this one screen instantly do a live comparison of our different scenarios. But we do take that a step further too because it's great to do that comparison within this screen at a high level. Scenario one is 85,000, scenario three is eighty seven thousand, but what does that mean? Where is that coming from? So what Lead Gen also gives the ability to do is I am able to click into scenario one and three as a planner, compare select it, and this is going to give me a live comparison based on the location selected, based on the time frame at hand, for my budget and my demand data. So if I want to see how my hours and wages are impacted over the week or maybe over the specific period, I can instantly see that breakdown between my two plans right here in one screen. And I can do that with demand as well. So if I'm testing some sort of assumption of maybe my items or my sales are going to increase during p 12 because that's a seasonal period, I can see that constraint, I can see that comparison right here in one screen before I act on a specific plan. And so this has gotten a little ahead because right now we're operating under the assumption that we do have two plans that we're happy with. We have scenario one. We have scenario three. But let's take a step back to understand, well, how did we get to that eighty five thousand hours? What's different scenarios or what different assumptions did we test? So if I click into scenario one, what this is going to do is it's then going to take me through that labor planning process flow. And I'm going to pause here for a second because prerequisites are huge. Prerequisites are going to be that true bottoms up build. So when we think about historical labor planning, a lot of times it's you get a top down target from finance and you try to figure out the best possible fit for your locations without actually understanding which one's a high performing location, which one's a low performing location, which one should get more or less hours. The first step in our process is to reference all of your configurations. So whether it's your labor model, specific attributes, your different configuration templates that are in the system. If you are running a plan for the next six months, we understand your effective dated operating hours, and we are creating this long range plan for you with all of the assumptions and your realities already in place. And I mentioned this earlier, but something important to hone back in on is this is using production data. So this isn't a what if that we're running in a early access environment or a UAT environment. This is something we are running live in production. We're not impacting the field yet, but we're using the actual field's operational realities. So we are able to see what we are doing in the field and access it right here during step one of our labor planning process. So I mentioned earlier high impact high velocity changes. So a lot of times what we see that changes plans from baseline, you have an amazing plan, you're working at 85,000, a lot of those high impact changes come from changes to operating hours, come from very importantly, changes to your labor model or your wage rates. So from a high impact, high velocity perspective, that moves us into actually testing different scenarios and being able to adjust for those scenarios right here within the UI itself. So if we wanted to test the scenario to say, if I extend my operating hours on Saturday by one hour, how is that going to impact my football? Or how is that going to impact the amount of hours I now need to bring in during that Saturday peak peak period when I'm adjusting my hours? From the labor planning UI, we have three different ways of making those adjustments for each of those high impact factors. So if we click on adjust in the screen here, we have the ability to edit grid. So this may or may not be feasible depending on the scope at which we are editing or the size of the business. So we do have the ability to come in and maybe if we're testing this for a couple of NSOs, we can quickly change this right here from this grid view that we see. Or we also have, if we come back to adjust, the ability to perform a bulk adjustment. So whether we are doing a bulk adjustment to our operating hours or to our wage rates, we do have within the user interface a way of making those bulk adjustments right here within the system without any sort of disconnected spreadsheets that maybe some of our planners are managing outside of the system. But since a lot of this is spreadsheet based historically and you might have 15 different planners that are responsible for different scenario analysis, different scenario modeling that they're running independently. We do also have the ability, and we will always keep the ability to do an upload as well. So if we do have an operating hours file that we are keeping outside outside of the system, we have made a few changes, we would want to see how those changes impact production before actually setting them into effect. We do have the ability to upload a file here. And for consistency, we will always have a data dictionary within the operating hours file itself. So if it's operating hours, if it's labor model, if it's wage rates, you will always know what formatting is needed because we will provide that transparency right here in the UI. And so that then takes us to labor model. So labor model is probably a very common change that most of you are making. This can be anything from your task to your standards. A common one that I see a lot from a labor modeling perspective is something like dock to stock. So today there's not a great way of saying, okay, we have this back stock back stock standard. What that does is it tells Legion this is how efficient we are of by the time the truck pulls in it takes this long to pull the inventory off the truck and then this long to stock it. There's not a great way of saying this is pretty labor consuming. We're seeing more hours than we would like from a stocking perspective. Let's come in and let's adjust that standard. Let's say using all of our production labor, let's say we can be 1% more efficient, 1% more effective at pulling these shipments off of the truck and stocking them. So we are able to test changes to our labor model or choose specific attributes like efficiency metrics right here within the UI without changing again our forecast within the system and test if we make that change how is that going to impact the total hours we need for specific roles or how is that then going to impact the time it takes us to truly do this unstock to restock unload of the system. So we are able to test those assumptions right here in the UI and then subsequently see how that impacts our guidance. And that does also take us to demand forecasting. And for demand forecasting, I like to think of this as, kind of two different tasks that you can take with demand forecasting in Legion, or with demand forecasting within the labor planning module. And the first is going to be just pure long range forecasting. So with labor planning, if you wanted to do a a long term look at your forecast, maybe you would want it to run this for the next three months, six months, even eighteen months. It's going to give a good idea of what is the demand that I'm expecting for sales during my peak hours period this upcoming holiday season. What do I need to plan and staff for based on the demand I am expected to see during that time? So this is a way to see kind of that raw demand in a longer range output rather than just seeing it maybe for the next five to six weeks when you are actually going in and creating schedules. But then the other side of this is not only are we producing that long range forecast, not only can we see our forecast and our expectations for week 14 through 52 now, we also have the ability of testing different assumptions. So if we need to, let's say test, we are expecting for a subset of our locations 3% higher footfall in sales this upcoming holiday season, and we really want to better understand how many more seasonal workers do we need to pull in. We are able to test that assumption right here within the UI by importing an updated forecast or something that I've seen commonly with customers using Or something that I've seen commonly with customers using labor planning today is this use of import event. Because when we created this plan six months ago, we weren't accounting for the World Cup being in some of the cities that we operating in this upcoming June. So now instead of having to do last minute changes to the forecast or instead of having our managers manually edit forecast to adjust for this new event, we have the ability to upload an event, have Legion then subsequently change our demand and our guidance accordingly to account for these things that might happen mid plan or mid period. And then finally, that takes us to running the guidance. So this is going to be your your head count. This is how many hours you're going to need to feasibly meet all of the operational realities that we've seen in steps one through five. And this is, this can be a hours breakdown. It can be a wages breakdown. Again, we can see this by week. We can see this by period as well just to better understand from an assumptions perspective what do we need to meet our targets? What do we need with our current constraints and current configurations within the system. But we can take this a step further because while we want to have the best possible bottoms up bill, we still have pressure coming from finance. So we do have the opportunity within the system to run guidance And when we run the guidance, this is where we can set those additional budget constraints. So if we have a specific constraint where we need to constrain to eighty five thousand hours because that's what our finance team is giving us, or we need to maybe upload a constraint to the system as well, We do have the ability to apply those top down constraints, but still look at the underlying bottoms up build. Meaning, if we have a constraint, we know where to constraint from because we already have visibility into which are your lower performing or your lower staffed locations that can cut a few hours. So we have that ability to apply those top down constraints in a more bottoms up conscious way. And then finally, once we have run our guidance, let's say that we are very happy with the output that we see here from a guidance perspective. We do have the ability in the UI based on the scenario that we are planning to enforce to actually publish this to our build. So there is no longer five different disconnected spreadsheets loading in your new forecast, loading in your new operating hours, loading in your new, guidance. You are able to apply all of those constraints that we just put into place in a matter of ten minutes right here in the UI and publish this out to your field. So you are not having to break this down by location or by role. We are able to enforce that directly into production right here from the UI. So I will pause there and I think I will pass that back to Wes, I think, just to kind of bring us home on labor planning and we will go from there. Yeah. Thank you, Mikaela. I think I'm gonna pass it to Riley. I think we're opening it up to the broader group. Yeah. We so we've got just a few minutes. We'll probably have time for one or two questions. Again, if you wanna submit some in the u n QA on the right hand side, we do have, a couple anonymous that I can move through. So, the first one for whoever wants to answer it is why is it important to connect labor planning with forecasting and scheduling, and how does Legion bring those pieces together in a way that actually improves outcomes? So it's very important to connect labor planning to forecasting and scheduling because that's what's actually happening in the field. If you're if you're getting a location 200 to work with but have no idea their location set up, you don't have any idea how they're performing from a sales perspective, it's likely that they're either going to manage over or manage under hours because you don't have any sort of insight into how they're actually performing in the hours they need. So by connecting it to that process, you are giving them a a budget to work off of that is actually feasible, which we have also seen decreases the amount of frustration that you're hearing from operations to you because they're not being expected to work, in feasible plans within the field. Yeah. I'll I'll add to that. I think at the end of the day, when you're doing any kind of data analysis, taking labor planning out of the question, like, you do you wanna reduce the amount of variables. So if you have two different systems, you're increasing the amount of variables between them between them. You're not comparing apples to apples, oranges to oranges. So, having it in one solution, fixes all that. Perfect. That makes a lot of sense. Well, we are we are pretty much at time. So I think I'm gonna wrap it up here. Really appreciate, Wes and Mikaela, for you guys sharing, your expertise and diving into Legion. Everyone too for today's session. Again, there's some resources in that docs area, specific to labor planning, some more Legion in action opportunities. And then if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, Legion, submit. We would love to continue the conversation. So thank you all for joining. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.