The IKEA-Shift Project research collaboration began in late 2019, just before the global coronavirus pandemic. The research collaboration was born of a mutual interest in improving scheduling conditions for hourly workers. IKEA has been working to advance a vision for a self-scheduling framework that would grant IKEA hourly co-workers more autonomy in setting the days and times of their work shifts. The Shift Project has been collecting survey data from hourly workers employed in the U.S. retail and food service sectors and studying work-scheduling conditions for the past 8 years.
Over the past 5 years, the Shift Project research team and representatives from the IKEA People Planning, Data Analytics, and Wellness teams have met weekly or biweekly to discuss the design, implementation, and data collection and analysis plans for the intervention.
In December 2024, our research team published the IKEA Self-Scheduling Intervention: Baseline Report. The baseline report situated the topic of self-scheduling in the broader research context, documented the scheduling conditions for IKEA co-workers before the launch of the intervention, and described the new self-scheduling features. The baseline report also described the research design for the evaluation of the intervention. This report now describes the implementation and impacts of the IKEA Self-Scheduling Intervention.