Productivity Pulse Episode 2

Hear directly from our experts—Sue, Simon, & James—who share real-world trends, new data findings, and actionable productivity insights 

We unpack the wage rise headlines and the quiet costs they trigger up the ladder, then move to peak‑time realities: queues, break timing, and the real use of self‑checkout. We finish with fast wins in quick‑serve layouts and why adoption fails without hands‑on coaching.

• Wage increases by age bands and implications for costs
• Compression of supervisory pay differentials
• Leaders pulled into front‑line tasks reducing leadership capacity
• Queues at peak despite self‑checkout availability
• Break timing clashing with customer demand
• Micro‑improvements in quick‑serve cycle times
• Layout tweaks, tool placement, and motion design
• Training and engagement to adopt new kit and processes

Keep an eye out for those queues at peak, everybody listening, and see if you can identify the issues, we'll be back in the new year

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Chapters

• 0:14 Setting The Agenda
• 0:31 Minimum Wage Increases Explained
• 1:11 Hidden Salary Ripples Up The Ladder
• 4:32 Are We Buying More Output Or Cost
• 4:35 Peak Season And Self‑Checkout Reality
• 5:05 Queues, Breaks, And Misdirected Labour
• 7:13 Smarter Break Design And Trade‑Offs
• 8:33 When Scheduling Software Meets Customers
• 9:23 Quick Serve Layouts And Seconds That Matter
• 11:23 Micro‑Improvements That Scale Capacity
• 12:24 New Kit, Old Habits
• 13:15 Training, Engagement, And Real Adoption
• 14:55 Efficiency Promises Versus Operational Reality

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:10

Welcome to the Productivity Podcast. This is the Productivity Pulse number two, and I am joined yet again by Sue and James. Hi Sue.

SPEAKER_00: 0:20

Hello.

SPEAKER_01: 0:20

Hi James. Hi Simon. So thanks for joining again. I'm sure we'll have an interesting debate as ever today. Just want to start with what was breaking news a couple of weeks ago, isn't so much now, but good to get your thoughts on the government announcing the national minimum wage increase from 1st of April 2026. So for those, and I'm sure everybody does know, but as a reminder, for over 21s, they'll get a 4.1% increase to£12.71 an hour. Anybody between 18 and 20 will get an 8.5% increase to£10.85 an hour. And 16 to 70 year olds and those who are on apprenticeships get a 6% increase which will work out£8 an hour. So good news for everybody in those brackets. Sue, your initial thoughts when it was announced.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13

It's interesting that it it kind of uh layers on top of other things that are happening. I suppose it wasn't a surprise that it went up. If you then think on top of that, the national insurance, the employees' national insurance contributions are then on that higher amount. And then there's lots of discussions about, particularly in hospitality, about the impact of rates, which I think it's not quite clear what the full impact of that's going to be. So it's it's you know, businesses are dealing with a whole load of lots of little amounts of increases, but if you're dealing with those on lots of fronts, there's some total effect can be a reasonably high impact that people have to consider.

SPEAKER_01: 1:53

Yeah, agreed. And and James, your your initial thoughts?

SPEAKER_02: 1:57

Just that it is ever more important to understand where people are spending that time because it's getting more expensive.

SPEAKER_01: 2:03

Yeah, absolutely. And and Sue, just before we move on to the the next kind of conversation topic, the one thing that always amazes me that's never in the press is kind of the upward pressure on salary, then. So that's great. Those people are getting 4.1, 8.5%, 6% pay rises. But I know we talk about it a lot, we talked about it a lot at the forum this year, and I'm sure it will be on the agenda next year. That differential then between supervisory roles, team leaders, deputies, assistants, store managers closes. So it that those headline figures are great, but it's not the total cost, is it? Because actually you end up having to keep that differential or accept the fact you shrink that differential for every for all the roles above that.

SPEAKER_00: 2:46

Yeah, and I think for years there's been, if I think back to my years in retail, there's been people that have looked at sort of leadership jobs and said, Do you know what? It's not a big enough increase to make it worthwhile me taking on all that hassle. And the challenges is that gap shrinks if you don't keep moving up all your costs in the same line, then it becomes you know a small salary differential for a lot more work.

SPEAKER_01: 3:11

Yeah, and I'd argue are the people that are getting these pay rise doing more for it, or actually, since national living wage kind of 10 years ago, are the people actually doing the same job and we're paying them more, which probably is the case. But again, it's about back to James's point, getting the most out of the processing there for the people. And to finish this this part of the kind of conversation, that increase of 4.1%,£12.71 means somebody who kind of works 40 hours a week over the course of a year is on about£26,000 a year. So, you know, great that we're bringing people up to a good level, a good standard, but that's an interesting number based on what people be paying for the roles above it. So again, pushing that inflation up the hierarchy in lots of organizations.

SPEAKER_02: 4:01

Well, and then we've seen that you know, we we talked about it in the last podcast, and we've seen it in studies that we've done since. Leaders get paid more. You know, you want to keep that diff differential there and pay them even more. Most of them are stacking shells half the time, they're not even doing leadership stuff. You really need to get on top of what they're doing.

SPEAKER_01: 4:17

Yeah, exactly. I I always say to people it can be an expensive way to stack shells, can't it? Which nicely, as if we'd talked about this before we started recording, leads us into peak. So we're recording this kind of just two weeks out before Christmas Day. I'm sure you've all been out shopping or will be out shopping in the next couple of days, week or so to get your final presence and food. So, Sue, I know you've been doing a lot of work with clients lately around kind of peak and self-checkout, and as we approach the peak of the festive period, or use peak again, I'm sure. What things have you been talking to them about based on the data the team have captured and James has analysed and provided the insights for?

SPEAKER_00: 5:01

As we talked about last time, we've seen increasing trends that as salary budgets have tightened versus the workload, there is a risk that as the workload, the resource isn't there for the peak times because there just isn't that same flexibility in the schedules. And we've seen a couple more studies over the last month where at busy the busiest times, so Saturday afternoons, that sort of thing, we're actually seeing quite big queues. And interestingly, it is in places where they've often got self-checkout tills available. I think people get caught on the on the assisted tills head down with the queue. It's then hard to find the time to heads up and think, actually, I could probably have one colleague looking after four customers if they were using a self-checkout till, as opposed to having this queue of eight people with two people on the tills. So it it remains a challenge. And I think James has spotted some other things in the data as well.

SPEAKER_02: 6:01

Well, I've seen on a couple of recent projects when there have been the most customers in the store, there's also been the most break time. And I know it's difficult in in stores when you have people on certain shifts, they need to have breaks at certain times. But in one client in particular, it almost looked like the team were thinking, great, we've got all the stock on the on the shelves, everything's looking good, now we can take a break. And then they let the queue build up while they're having their break and then come back and serve customers when they've when they're finished. And surely it would be better to leave the store standards slightly lower and serve the customers and get them through uh when when you're busy, and then schedule the the restocking and the breaks at a different time. It's easy for me to say sitting analysing the data in Excel, but just you know, we're seeing over 10% break time uh uh at these peak customer times, it just seems a little bit counterintuitive to me.

SPEAKER_00: 6:52

Yeah, and there's people have looked at different patterns for breaks. So there's there's generally some flexibility, even if you know there are legal requirements about break periods after working, you know, a certain number of hours. But generally there are some there is some flexibility. And people have done things like instead of having one break sort of a longer lunch break, which is often when you're busiest, do you have two shorter breaks, so like half an hour breaks or something, where you put them in the um in the shoulder hours, if you like, of so you're avoiding that peak time. You just have to be careful to avoid what we saw in in another client's data, where they'd introduced extra breaks in the morning and the afternoon. And actually, what they found is that often when colleagues go on break, the time that I take to walk to the break room, I don't count as my break. So my break starts when I get to the break room, I then have my 10 minutes, I then need to put my stuff back in the locker, I need to go to the toilet, and then I walk back to my workstation. So that 10-minute break is actually causing you know 20 minutes of downtime for the business. So having two of those breaks is actually causing a you know a bigger loss to the business, if you like, than just having one break. So there's a there's a sweet spot of having decent, chunky enough size breaks that people aren't losing lots of time going backwards and forwards to break, but then not just having one big lump of break that has to happen when the customers want you as well.

SPEAKER_01: 8:29

And I suppose as add to that, a lot of the organizations now across the world are using their workforce management solutions to help schedule a break, and it's always been that really tricky one back to James's point of how does it know about customers because it's doing some mathematical calculation. So I always find that interesting when break automatic break planning doesn't necessarily match what the organization needs at that moment in time versus customer demand or density or whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_02: 8:58

Yeah, we saw on uh on a recent management study quite a lot of time devoted to changing the automatic schedule and you know, manually managing when people should take their breaks through the day so there are a minimum number there, which is also, I guess, another hidden cost of the breaks is how how long are your managers spending coordinating it. Yeah, it's a tricky one to balance.

SPEAKER_01: 9:18

Interesting. So keep an eye if you're out shopping, have a look at uh where there's potential cues or people manning their self-checkouts, and I suppose make make your own conclusions of of how and why that is. So you've you've also been doing some really interesting work on I'd call it new kit, but I think more fundamentally new layout in more of the restaurant quick serve area that you'd like to talk about.

SPEAKER_00: 9:40

Yeah, we've been doing quite a lot with different quick serve restaurant brands recently. And I always find it really interesting how just tiny tweaks can make such a difference. And we're talking about things that'll shave seconds off a task. So it might be building a burger or making a coffee or but if there are the things that your team are doing all day, every day, those time savings really add up. And again, if we're going to mention the peak word again, what matters when you're generally in those quick serve restaurants is you've got high demand for a concentrated period of time. So increasing your throughput capacity at those busy times actually can help drive your sales because you've got high demand. How do you meet that demand and therefore optimise what your sales are? That's by getting your capacity right. So if you can take a few seconds off and look at how many more of whatever it is you can produce in that time, then it makes a big difference. And it it's really simple things that when you stand back and think about it, they're really obvious. Yet when your head's down in the operation and kind of it's all flying at you, then it's not so easy to see. And we've seen things like it's where people are keeping the different utensils that they need to hand. In one operation, they had to use tongs to pick up products to move them from one place to another. They kept those tongs in a box with a lid on it. So every time they wanted the turn the tongs, they had to take the lid off the box, then pick up the tongs, then put the lid on the box, use the tongs, and then repeat the whole lid on and off process again. And they weren't even doing it two-handed, they'd pick the lid up, actually put it down on the bench, and then pick it up again. It wasn't even just holding it and you know, taking the tongs out while that that's happening. So it sounds something really simple, but it just adds so much time into the process.

SPEAKER_01: 11:39

And from an engagement point of view, where you've seen new or touch briefly on layouts, how do you how does that typically work when process change or layout change? I think people are very good at probably the plan, the fit out, the the physical aspect of it, but does that always flow through in terms of how the team then engage with it and and see the benefits or don't see the benefits?

SPEAKER_00: 12:07

Yeah, that's another thing we've seen quite a bit all recently. And if I think back over time, we've done uh done lots of times when we've been asked to go into measure the impact of either a new layout or a new piece of kit being added in. And I can't think of a single time where it's actually worked as people are expected to. Usually because colleagues aren't working with the kit the way they were expected to, or and sometimes we've had people that don't know how to use it and we've actually been saying, Oh, did you know it's got this function? It was supposed to be one of the things we're there to measure, but the team don't even know it happened. But actually, what it's human nature that people default back to the way they used to work unless you really help them get to that new way of doing it. So we were looking at a a revised layout recently to help improve the workflow. And actually the colleagues were still working in it like they did in the old one. It just it wasn't quite as easy to work into the on because the light was trying to get them to work differently, and yet they were not doing that. And it it needs that real engagement piece and that how you really work with it and engage with it needs to be, you know, trained into people and have conversations and the role of the leaders or the operational leads in there to help people stick with that new way of working. Because it's like that old trick where if you fold your arms one way and then you fold them the other way, one way feels much more comfortable than the other. You know, anytime you're asking your teams to do something different, whether it's with a new piece of kit, work with a new layout, it is it's that feeling of trying to cross your hands the other way. And you've got to really help them do it. And that as you said, I think there's a lot of time and effort going into making sure all the kit arrives, everything's plumbed in or whatever needs to happen. But actually, perhaps that piece about and how are your teams going to work with it and and really get to grips with it and get the most of it, it's perhaps a little neglected at times.

SPEAKER_01: 14:05

And that must be a challenge because lots of these programs are based on efficiencies, aren't they? So that there'll be some they're not free, right? So somebody, there's a way you have to pay for it somewhere, typically through labour, through an efficiency. So if you've spent spent the money and then not received the efficiency, it's the worst of everything, right?

SPEAKER_00: 14:25

Yes, you end up with potentially the worst of all ones, don't you? If you've spent the money and not saved any costs. Or even worse, if you spend the money, you then take out the salary and the people still work as they did. What you've done is either reduced the quality of the service or you've reduced your capacity and therefore your sales are going to go down. You know, it can happen. It's not a good end solution, whichever way around it happens.

SPEAKER_01: 14:51

And James, when you look at the data for these types of projects, is it kind of clear that things haven't necessarily moved, or are there examples where it's moved really well?

SPEAKER_02: 15:00

I know. I mean, there are always examples where it's moved really well. But I think it doesn't just apply to new Git, it's new processes, new new software packages as well. Working with a client recently who was saying, you know, oh, everybody should be doing using this tool and they should use it once a day. And when we went into the stores, actually they were doing it once or twice a week and they weren't using the new tool because I still thought it was right. And that's where the um constructed interviews were useful and just kind of talking to a few people they're able to feedback on on why they weren't using it. And I suspect it's a whole different podcast episode or maybe even a series, but you know, start with engaging people and then launch the tool. Don't launch the tool and then try and engage them in using it.

SPEAKER_01: 15:43

Yeah, and I think we've probably all had experiences in our work life where we've we've been given something and technology gets easier. Nobody has a user manual for their iPhone, do they, or or Google Phone anymore, which maybe is where the assumptions made it's easy to do. But yeah, I suspect we've all certainly on this podcast, and maybe a lot of those listening have had experiences where things have been assumed, and actually the reality in the operation means that it's it's not possible or slightly different, or there's a misunderstanding. And back to Sue's point of did you know it did this? No, you're just losing losing benefit. So we'll pause there for this episode. Thank you, Sue. Thank you, James. Keep an eye out for those cues at peak, everybody listening, and uh see if you can identify the issues, and we'll be back in the new year. Thanks both. Cheers, I mean, bye.