Director, Store Labor Strategy, Performance & Workforce Management

kate spade new york•New York, NY

1d•$170,000 - $185,000

About The Position

As the Director of Store Labor Strategy, Performance & Workforce Management, you will be responsible for owning the strategy, standards, systems and execution processes that translate Coach North America’s labor investment into selling capacity, customer experience, and profitable store performance. Sitting under the Vice President of North America Finance, and partnering closely with Retail Operations, this role combines rigorous analytical insight and operational understanding, as business owner of implementing and maintaining a demand-driven labor model– and ensuring it is planned, deployed, measured and continuously improved across the North America store fleet. You will lead a cross-functional team focused on optimizing labor processes through automation, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting, and will collaborate closely with senior stakeholders to harness data-driven insights that enhance cost efficiency.

Requirements

Deep experience building retail labor models from raw inputs — not inheriting them; demonstrated ability to implement and maintain a demand-driven model at scale.
Fluency in work driver architecture: selling, BOH, task, and census planning.
Proven track record of earning trust across finance, operations, and field simultaneously.
Demonstrated ability to run structured pilots and read results with statistical credibility.
Proficiency with workforce management platforms and their reporting modules; hands-on WFM platform experience at scale.
Demonstrated experience leveraging AI or advanced analytics tools to enhance analysis, automate workflows, or improve business outcomes.
Strong analytical capability at the day and hour level; comfort with large datasets and BI tools.
10+ years in retail labor planning, workforce management, or related operational and financial roles.
Proficiency in Excel; experience with demand-driven scheduling platforms.

Responsibilities

Own the business framework for how store labor drives sales growth, customer conversion, selling effectiveness, and productivity across the fleet.
Define and maintain the four labor buckets — base, demand-driven, investment, and exception — establishing clear financial guardrails and decision rights for each.
Develop ROI frameworks that enable the organization to evaluate labor as a profit investment, not just a cost to control.
Partner with Finance and Retail Operations to ensure labor planning aligns with sales forecasts, payroll targets, productivity expectations, and business priorities.
Provide labor, productivity, and operating assumptions that inform store fleet decisions including new stores, remodels, and relocations.
Implement and maintain a demand-driven labor model that reflects selling requirements, customer traffic patterns, operational workload, and store complexity across all channels and formats.
Define labor requirements across all major work roles: selling, service, cashiering, management, replenishment, receiving, visual execution, and omnichannel activity.
Establish and enforce the distinction between selling and non-selling labor — ensuring clear visibility into true selling capacity, TPSLH, and productivity by role.
Own all business rules and labor logic within the workforce management platform, including work roles, demand drivers, labor buckets, scheduling rules, forecasting inputs, and exception processes.
Partner with Retail Operations, Field Leadership, HR, Analytics, and Technology to keep workforce management processes accurate, scalable, and grounded in store reality.
Regularly recalibrate standards based on store activity, business performance, field feedback, and operational change.
Conduct day- and hour-level analysis to optimize labor allocation — identifying where labor is under-deployed, over-deployed, or misaligned relative to demand and opportunity.
Define the operating routines that translate labor standards and demand forecasts into effective store schedules, ensuring alignment across customer demand, associate availability, operational requirements, and financial guardrails.
Establish governance for labor exceptions, schedule overrides, incremental requests, events, and unplanned needs — creating clear decision rights and accountability at each level of the field.
Monitor the full labor execution chain: planned hours → scheduled hours → worked hours → actual selling coverage, and diagnose where breakdowns occur.
Build reporting and feedback loops that give field leaders actionable visibility into labor productivity, selling coverage, conversion performance, and payroll adherence — reporting that drives behavior, not just tracking.
Design and run structured labor pilots with defined hypotheses, control groups, success metrics, and invalidation criteria; translate results into model updates or scaled deployment decisions.
Lead continuous improvement of workforce planning, scheduling, payroll forecasting, and labor deployment processes across the fleet.
Partner with Finance, Retail Operations, HR, and Store Leadership to integrate labor requirements and productivity expectations into annual planning, forecasts, and business reviews.
Co-own store-level bonus targeting by providing labor productivity and operational performance input, ensuring incentive targets reflect store reality and drive the right behaviors.
Communicate labor strategy, model logic, and performance insights clearly to finance, field, and senior leadership — bridging analytical rigor with store-level human context.