Picnic’s supply chain teams work with in-house recruited Runners (electric vehicle drivers) and Shoppers (order pickers). Investing in local talent has been key to building a sustainable, thriving workforce. This approach brings stronger engagement, better alignment with our culture, and a better customer experience. Every day Picnic Runners deliver smiles to customers’ doorsteps.

Working with in-house recruited employees brings its own set of challenges. Among many things, scheduling is a big one.

A delicate balancing act

Typically scheduling is a non-core, trivial process for businesses. The main goal is simple: have the right number of people in the right place and time. Underneath that simple sentence, a world of trade-offs emerges as scheduling is a balancing act with multiple dimensions:

• Income security: employees have a desired income to cover their expenses, usually secured through contracted hours. Often this leads to employers setting rigid shift schedules to ensure those hours align with business needs, but which limits employee flexibility and autonomy.
• Employee flexibility: modern workers demand work that fits around their personal lives. Surveys consistently show that employees value this, however individual preferences vary widely. Some may want full flexibility or fixed schedules, while others prefer tailored combinations (e.g. working three days a week, never on Fridays and the possibility to claim extra work last-minute). The range of needs is virtually endless.
• Business flexibility: employers also require flexibility to align staffing with fluctuating demand on a seasonal, weekly, or daily basis. Overplanning, by scheduling too many employees for the available work, threatens margins — especially in the low-margin grocery industry. Understaffing, however, risks losing sales and disappointing customers.

These factors often seem at odds with each other. Greater income security can reduce employee flexibility, potentially limiting efficiency. And the result of flexibility is bittersweet when it leads to a loss of income security.

But is that actually true? Do income security and flexibility really clash? Or can we offer both while maintaining efficient schedules? We took on this challenge to make a significant breakthrough in this area. And here’s the good news: we believe we’re on to a “yes!”

New scheduling tech enables new outcomes

Let’s dive in. What elements are essential to finding new, better-balanced outcomes for everyone?

Step 1: contract types with hour balances

At Picnic, all employees in Germany, France, and many in the Netherlands are on contracts with hour balances. These contracts (in the Netherlands called “jaarurennorm”, in Germany “Arbeitszeitkonto” and in France “modulation du temps de travail”) allow employees to work more during busy periods and less during quieter times, while still receiving a stable monthly salary. This helps employers align work with business demands and reduce temporary staffing, while employees benefit from financial stability. However, careful workforce planning and hour balance management are needed to make it work.

Step 2: user-friendly front-end that allows to mix and match scheduling concepts

Companies typically apply a one-size-fits-all scheduling strategy for their entire workforce. This strategy is usually one out of the three most common scheduling methods:

• Fixed schedules: employees are planned well in advance with rigid schedules, often used in healthcare and manufacturing, leaving little flexibility to adjust their work around personal commitments.
• Availability-based scheduling: employees provide their availability (or unavailability) and are scheduled accordingly.
• Claiming: shifts are posted, and employees claim the ones they want. This gives employees more control over their schedules but offers fewer guarantees regarding consistent work hours.

But what if we, instead of one-size-fits-all, could combine these methods to fulfil different personal needs?

Imagine allowing employees to choose the best model for them — or even better, to mix and match models. For example, employees could have fixed shifts on Monday and Tuesday totalling sixteen hours, while scheduling an additional ten hours based on availability. They could also claim last-minute shifts when it suits them or pass on shifts to someone else if their schedule changes.

That’s why we took on the challenge of developing a sophisticated front-end that allows employees to have (partly) fixed schedules, fill in availability easily, swap shifts among team members, claim last-minute extra work if they want to, or give it away if possible in one app.

Step 3: powerful back-end

Behind this front-end, there’s a back-end with configurable constraints, sophisticated operational rules, advanced algorithms and forecasts to make schedules and adjust for last-minute changes in demand and supply.

Scheduling and managing hour balances, especially at a scale of thousands of employees, can be cumbersome and leads to a lot of scheduling back and forth. With conditional constraints in all planning process steps, we can limit overhead massively. This ranges from constraints to ensure that employees provide enough availability (conditional to contracted hours), to constraints in claiming (conditional to working-hours-acts), to constraints in dropping (conditional to hour balances).

Nowadays, our so-called People Planning System schedules tens of thousands of shifts per week across 350 locations in three countries. Since the first version of our planning system, we have been iterating continuously. This helped reduce overplanning by 5% to sometimes even 15% while meeting employee preferences better than before.

Step 4: iterating further

Yet, we are still at the start. We can enhance both scheduling and other engagement opportunities through our employee app.

On the scheduling side, there is much potential to further improve employee experience while getting even better schedules. For example, via (dynamic) bonuses for hard-to-fill shifts, waiting lists for popular shifts, and more variation in shift times.

On the engagement side, we have plans to better inform employees via in-app newsfeeds, clear insights in payables, and closing the feedback loop from customer to employee via the app. Our “Spotify Wrapped”-style periodical updates circle back fun facts like the most delivered products and personalised customer feedback. These weekly and annual personalised insights create a sense of pride, ownership and belonging.

Micro-level solution for macro-level challenge

Furthermore, it’s exciting to innovate with advanced scheduling solutions, as they may offer new micro-level answers to a larger, macro-level challenge.

Since flex contracts have surged in the Netherlands, the demand for regulation has grown. Meanwhile, businesses and employees require a degree of flexibility too.

We’re not claiming to have solved this challenge fully yet, but we’re optimistic about what’s ahead. For shift-based employees, we believe our layered approach can meet diverse employee needs while keeping operations smooth and efficient. This win-win is crucial, especially in today’s tight labour market where attractive alternatives abound.