IKEA Self-Scheduling Intervention: Baseline Report

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In October 2019, Björn Sunesson, then the People Planning Manager at IKEA in Sweden, reached out to Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett, the co-directors of The Shift Project, after encountering coverage of The Shift Project research in the New York Times. This research resonated with Björn, who had been working to advance a vision for a self-scheduling framework that would grant IKEA hourly workers more autonomy in setting the days and times of their work shifts. This connection sparked a research collaboration between IKEA and The Shift Project that included the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Self-Scheduling Intervention in the U.S.

Over the past 4 years, The Shift Project research team and representatives from the IKEA People Planning, Data Analytics, and Wellness teams have met weekly to discuss the design, implementation, and data collection and analysis plans for the intervention.

In this report, we begin by situating the topic of self-scheduling in the broader research context. We then document the scheduling conditions for IKEA co-workers before the launch of the intervention, and describe the new self-scheduling features. Next, we describe the research design for the planned evaluation of the intervention. We end with discussions of future directions, including the future evaluation report that will describe implementation and the effects of the Self-Scheduling Intervention.

Read the full report here.