Thirteen-hundred Gap employees are part of a study to see, among other things, if an app can make retail work better for workers.
Via Flickr: seattlemunicipalarchives
For many American workers, this is a short week, one that ends in the reward of one or two days off work, a big meal, and time spent with friends and family. But for retail workers, this weekend is the kickoff of a nearly two-month-long slog through the holiday season: last-minute shifts, packed stores, frenzied customers.
A big part of that is on-call shift scheduling, in which staff are required to be available for shifts that can be canceled at any time with no pay. Recently, in response to criticism of the practice, retail behemoths including Abercrombie & Fitch, Victoria's Secret, and Gap have abandoned the practice. Gap Inc. in particular has partnered with the University of California Hastings College of Law on a study aimed at finding solutions to the harried nature of retail work, year round. Researchers will spend nine months observing the effects of policies, such as a mandatory two-week advance on schedules, on workers.
One thing the Gap thought might help is making it easier for workers to communicate with one another. White-collar workers are accustomed to having corporate email accounts that hook into messaging applications like Slack or HipChat, giving them constant — maybe even too much — access to their colleagues. But aside from long, often confusing group text messages on personal phone numbers, there's really no equivalent for people who work in places like restaurants.
That's a problem that ShiftMessenger has been trying to solve since the company emerged from Y Combinator last year. Today, the company is announcing a partnership with 30 Gap stores in Chicago and San Francisco to see whether its technology can help retail workers — 1,300 of them — get through the holiday season with a little less stress. ShiftMessenger, a WhatsApp-type app that allows co-workers to post and pick up unwanted shifts as well as share pictures and chat, has already made adjustments to its product to coordinate better with Gap. Last week, it rolled out a groups function that separates different job types.
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