Deputy gave Weekends Only an immediate ROI of $10k and saves them $48k worth of time annually

There's a reason why Weekends Only solely opens its doors for customers to shop three days a week. Their team strongly believes their customers deserve the best in their homes – and are committed to helping customers find furniture pieces they love, at the most affordable prices. 

To achieve this, Weekends Only spends Mondays through Thursdays finding the best deals possible, so they can pass on the best savings to their customers on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. 

With this unique operating schedule and staff working under a non-commissioned model, their leadership team’s top priorities include creating the most efficient schedules for more than 400 employees. They’re also focused on scaling their business and enhancing the employee experience across eight of their stores that operate in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and DC. 

When Heather Woods joined Weekends Only seven years ago as their Talent Solutions Manager, her top goal was to help the business reach these objectives. She wanted to help different parts of the business identify solutions that would help them “achieve stronger operational strategy and leadership objectives.” She was also searching for a system that integrated with the different platforms her team was already using.

After trying and testing different time and attendance systems, Weekends Only was still facing challenges when it came to creating efficient schedules for their sales floors and maintaining sufficient coverage to help customers. 

“We worked with a couple of different systems to try to build and work with their scheduling tools, but they weren’t able to really take into consideration a lot of layers that we wanted to add in,” says Heather.

One of those layers was solving the complexities of scheduling their part-time and full-time staff. “We have to ensure that full-time employees are scheduled before part-time employees, otherwise the schedule could fill up with part-time employees, and our full-time employees won’t have enough hours,” Heather explains. 

Another layer was ensuring correct coverage and avoiding any overspending on labor. Heather recalls that her team invested in building a forecasting model through their ERP system to help determine how many employees they needed on the sales floor. However, she says, “it was really hard for our managers to write a schedule against that forecast, especially when you’ve got peak periods.” 

Weekends Only also found that the previous systems weren’t effective with team communication and collaboration – which impacted the employee experience. For example, if their team decided to close their locations due to bad weather, there wasn’t a quick or easy way to notify employees not to come in. 

Formerly, managers would need to manually log into the HR system, download a list of all the employee phone numbers, then contact every staff member. Afterward, managers would need to leave a note for each contact to state whether they were able to reach the employee.

Weekends Only turned to Deputy to solve these challenges, and Heather spent dedicated time testing the system to ensure it was up to the task. 

“Deputy was really great about giving us a sandbox environment to test and play with,” Heather says. She also admits that she was initially trying to find ways to break something in Deputy to test the software’s limitations, but she ultimately found that it checked all the boxes her team wanted in a scheduling system.

Mobile Scheduling, Time and Attendance

Deputy’s mobile app has been hugely beneficial for both managers and employees at Weekend Only. “The biggest benefits for managers is being able to see who’s available, who’s trained in each particular work area, and get employee suggestions,” Heather says. 

Weekends Only managers also find Deputy’s open shifts feature very useful, which enables them to offer shifts out to their employee pool with the click of a button. Heather explains, “we have a fairly robust seasonal population when people only work spike times during the year. It’s really nice to be able to utilize that feature to be able to send out shifts to people and fill the schedule.” 

For employees, they’ve expressed how easy and convenient it is for them to use and check timesheet accuracy before they’re submitted to payroll. They also like that they can access their schedules from their own devices at any time. 

Heather adds,“[Since using Deputy], “I would say we have a very low percentage of no-shows. Scheduling visibility has created much better attendance.”

Enhanced employee experience

Heather says that Deputy’s newsfeed feature has also been a “huge game-changer” for her entire retail organization.

“Deputy helps our leaders and our employees stay connected to each other, provides clarity around what's expected of our employees, and what time they're expected to be here. And then they use the tasks feature to help them identify any special things that need to be done throughout the course of the shift. It creates accountability and it's just fun for them. They use it to communicate back and forth and just make time at work a little more enjoyable.”

She adds, “Deputy has helped us keep staff connected to the company. As a retailer, the most important thing that you can do for your people is helping them feel connected, and help them feel like they know what’s going on.”

Valuable time and money saved

It used to take two managers three to four hours per week to work on scheduling. Since using Deputy, management has been able to create schedules within an hour. 

This has saved management a total of 336 hours per year – which Heather reports is worth approximately $48k annually to the business. 

Heather also highlighted what their leadership team has been able to achieve with that extra time: 

“Think about all the hours that are saved by the leaders, that they are then able to spend either staffing their stores, developing their people, and ensuring that their people are trained and ready for the next step in their career. They've been able to shift a lot of that time that was spent scheduling over to those focuses.”

She adds, “Ultimately, what led us on the search for a system like Deputy is [overcoming] the obstacles that were preventing our leaders from really focusing on things that are most impactful to the business: developing our people, driving and engaging culture.”

Ready to Scale

Weekends Only is continuously growing its business. They have a 5-year plan to open five new stores, in new markets, as part of an effort to continue expanding their footprint and climb among the top 100 furniture retailers in America.

Heather shares, “Deputy will continue to help drive engagement and enthusiasm as we continue to expand over lots of different areas in different states. As we get further and further apart in proximity, it will help us stay connected and close as a company and as a team. It will help us drive that one team, one goal mindset.”