It Matters 03: Skills Are the New Workforce Currency
Skills can kill a business.
I have said that for years. And every time I do, I watch people in the room process it, somewhere between agreement and skepticism. It sounds dramatic. But after decades of workforce management experience across retail, healthcare, distribution, and services, I have seen it happen too many times to soften the statement.
The version of this story I want to tell today starts with a large specialty retailer. They came to us struggling. Sales were underperforming. Schedule quality was poor. And despite having what appeared to be a sufficient number of employees, location after location was failing to build solid, fully staffed schedules.
Their hypothesis, as is almost always the case, was that the technology was at fault.
It was not.
The Assessment: What We Set Out to Understand
When Improv begins an engagement, we do not start with conclusions. We start with questions.
We spent time with the leadership team understanding the challenges they were facing and, more importantly, defining the customer experience they wanted to be delivering. We built a clear picture of their labor budgeting process, labor drivers, and standards. We understood the core building blocks of their scheduling strategy before we ever looked at a schedule.
Then we went to the stores.
We visited a deliberate mix, top performers, middle performers, and those at the bottom. We spent time with store leadership understanding their process and their thinking. We listened to their frustrations. And part of our team spent time on the floor, observing and asking questions of the frontline team at the right moments.
Our objective was to understand how stores were being scheduled at the most granular level, which required understanding required skills, knowledge, experience, efficiency expectations, and more. Not just what the system was producing, but why.
What the analysis revealed was not a technology failure. It was a foundational failure in how skills were being defined, tracked, developed, and connected to the scheduling process.
What We Found: The Skills Gap Nobody Saw
For COOs and operations leaders managing multi-location businesses, this list will be familiar. For CHROs who believe the skills infrastructure is working because it was built, this will be uncomfortable.
Skills not properly associated with employees. Even when a resource had a skill, it was frequently not tracked or linked to their profile in a way the scheduling system could recognize. The capability existed in the building. The system could not see it, so it could not use it.
New required skills never added to the system. As the business evolved and new roles or departments required specific expertise, the skills taxonomy was never updated. Employees without proper training were being scheduled into areas that required knowledge they did not have. Customer dissatisfaction followed. Sales suffered. And no one could connect the dots because the data was never there to connect.
No clear metrics for minimum skilled coverage. There was no definition of how many resources with a particular skill were required in a given area at any given time. Without that floor, the scheduling system had no way to flag understaffing by capability, only by headcount. Areas appeared covered on paper while critical skills were absent on the floor.
No structured development strategy. The path for employees to gain new skills and expand their scheduling eligibility was ad hoc at best. Some employees were sitting in narrow roles, not because they lacked potential, but because no one had built a clear plan to develop and certify them. The result: employees not getting the hours they wanted, feeling underutilized and undervalued, and leaving. Turnover driven not by culture or compensation, but by a skills planning failure.
When we presented these findings to organizational leadership, the reaction was one we see often: they believed most of these things were already in place. Some were, but not being enforced or followed up on. Others had simply never been built. And many had been built once and left alone as the business evolved around them.
This is what we call the "set it and forget it" trap. Your business changes every day. Customer expectations shift. New products require new knowledge. Roles evolve. Technology changes what skills are needed and what skills are obsolete. If you do not maintain your process, your data, your standards, and your skills infrastructure, they will not produce what you need to run the business. They will produce what the business needed when they were last updated.
The Resolution: Building the Foundation Back
We worked with this client to correct the most critical gaps and set them on a clear path to address the rest.
That meant rebuilding the skills taxonomy to reflect the current reality of the business. It meant properly associating existing employee skills with their profiles, in many cases surfacing capability that had been invisible to the scheduling process for years. It meant defining minimum skilled coverage requirements by area so the system could schedule to capability, not just headcount. And it meant building a structured development framework so employees had a visible path to expand their eligibility and grow their hours.
The results were not uniform, and that was instructive in itself. Locations that had fewer foundational gaps saw sales improvements relatively quickly once scheduling quality improved. Locations with deeper systemic issues took longer, but the direction changed. The tool, once given the right foundation, started producing what the client had always expected it to produce.
The technology was never broken. It was running on bad data, incomplete skills profiles, and a process that had not kept pace with the business.
This Is Not a Retail Story
Before I go further, I want to name something directly.
The retail example is the anchor. But the dynamic is universal, and in our priority verticals of healthcare and distribution, the consequences are even more significant.
In healthcare, our primary focus at Improv, skills are not a scheduling convenience. They are a patient safety and compliance requirement. A nurse certified for a specific care level, a technician qualified for a particular procedure, a caregiver licensed for a specific patient population, these are not interchangeable. When skills are not properly tracked, credentialed, and connected to the scheduling process, organizations face three compounding risks simultaneously: regulatory exposure, quality of care degradation, and workforce burnout from employees placed in roles they are not equipped or authorized to fill. Healthcare organizations that treat skills management as an HR administrative function rather than an operational discipline are carrying risk they cannot fully see.
In distribution and logistics, forklift certification, hazardous materials handling, equipment-specific qualifications, and leadership depth on each shift determine whether a warehouse hits throughput targets or not. Skills gaps here consistently masquerade as headcount problems and get addressed with overtime spend rather than planning discipline, costing significantly more than the underlying fix would have.
In retail, the story we opened with is the norm, not the exception. Register proficiency, product knowledge, department-specific expertise, loss prevention certification, all of it must be tracked, maintained, and connected to scheduling decisions or the customer experience suffers in ways that are hard to trace back to a root cause.
In hospitality and food service, skills determine service quality, speed, and safety at every shift. A line cook without current food safety certification, a front desk agent without system proficiency, a banquet team without event-specific training, each represents both a service risk and a compliance exposure that most organizations are not tracking at the scheduling level.
In financial and professional services, the skills picture is less about physical certifications and more about client-facing expertise, regulatory licensing, and the institutional knowledge that determines which team members can handle which client relationships or case types. When that expertise is not mapped and connected to workload distribution, utilization suffers and client experience becomes inconsistent.
In service businessesoperating across multiple locations, the impact is direct and measurable, and the proof of concept I am about to share puts a number on it that should change how any multi-location leader thinks about this problem.
The Number That Should Stop You Cold
In a separate engagement, Improv worked with a service company operating under multiple banners across the United States, an organization with an annual payroll exceeding $1 billion. We ran a proof of concept across 30 locations, focused specifically on properly connecting employee skills to scheduling decisions.
The result: an average increase of more than 20% across all 30 locations.
And I want to be precise about what that 20% represented. This was not simply an efficiency gain, though that alone would be significant at that payroll scale. This was a revenue gain. Properly skilled employees in the right roles at the right times produced better service, higher throughput, and measurable top-line improvement. The business case was not about doing the same work faster. It was about doing the right work better, and capturing the revenue that had been sitting uncaptured because the skills infrastructure was not supporting it.
The estimated ROI on a full implementation was 4 to 6 weeks.
On a billion-dollar payroll. Four to six weeks.
The client chose not to move forward. The perceived disruption to field teams felt too significant. The change felt too hard.
I respect that change is difficult. I have spent my career helping organizations navigate it. But I want to be direct about what that decision meant: every day after that choice, the organization left documented, quantified, achievable performance improvement on the table. The cost of inaction did not disappear. It compounded, at billion-dollar-payroll scale.
This is a pattern we see more often than I would like. The data is clear. The ROI is documented. The path forward is defined. And the organization steps back because the change feels bigger than the problem. What they cannot always see in that moment is that the problem is already costing them, in revenue not captured, in productivity not realized, in employees not fully utilized. The cost is real. It is just invisible until someone measures it.
The cost of a skills management failure is rarely a single dramatic event. It is the slow accumulation of missed revenue, excess turnover, preventable errors, scheduling gaps, and customer experiences that fall short, day after day, location after location, until it becomes the baseline everyone has accepted as normal.
The Questions Worth Asking Right Now
If you lead operations, HR, or the business overall in a multi-location organization, here are the questions that matter:
Do you have a current, accurate skills inventory, one that reflects what your employees can actually do today, not what their job title suggests?
Are employee skills properly tracked and connected to your scheduling system in a way it can actually use?
Have you defined minimum skilled coverage requirements by area, department, or shift, or are you scheduling to headcount and assuming the skills will be there?
When new roles, technologies, or service lines are introduced, is there a formal process for adding the required skills and certifying employees before they are scheduled into those areas?
Do your employees have a visible, structured path to develop new skills, expand their scheduling eligibility, and grow their contribution to the business?
When was the last time your skills infrastructure was audited against the current reality of your business, not the business you had three years ago?
If any of these questions surface uncertainty, skills are likely costing you more than you realize. And the gap between where you are and where you could be is probably larger than your current data lets you see.
Where We Go From Here
This is Post 3 in the It Matters series. We started with workforce strategy as the foundation. We talked about time as the first place strategy either holds or falls apart. Now we are talking about skills, because once you have the right foundation and the right visibility into your time, the next question is whether the right people with the right capabilities are doing the right work.
Next, we will talk about managers, the leaders who sit closest to where all of this either works or breaks down, and why enabling them properly is one of the highest-leverage investments an organization can make.
Skills are not an HR data problem. They are a business performance problem. And they may already be at the heart of challenges you are facing, whether your current data shows it or not.
If you want to understand what your skills picture actually looks like, and what it is costing you, let's have that conversation. That is exactly the work we do.
About Improv
Vincent Jackson is the President of Improvizations, a workforce management solutions company helping organizations align their people strategy with their business outcomes. He hosts The Leadership Mindset and Workforce on Deck podcasts and brings 30 years of global business leadership to every client engagement.
Improv has decades of proven success in Workforce Management, Human Capital Management, and business transformation, we’re here to help you navigate complex change. Our industry-specific expertise, adaptable solutions, and technology independence drive measurable outcomes that evolve with your business.
