I know it may seem like some days there are too many TM's and other days you need more however please remember ETL's are also under restrictions to the amount of hours they have.
I totally get that, but it's a consistent problem at my store where they will schedule far too many people early in the week and leave the weekends bare. This is particularly prevalent in the Backroom and SFS, where they will schedule more people on weekdays than on the weekends. For dayside backroom, on any given weekday we might have a total of 5 BRTM's scheduled (6am-2:30pm, 8am-4:30pm, 10am-6:30pm, 11am-7:30pm, and 2:30pm-11pm) which is more than enough to deal with whatever is thrown at us, and we're able to make progress on ELAs and other projects. But on weekends, we will have a maximum of 3 BRTM's scheduled (typically 8a-4:30pm, 10-7:30pm, and 2:30pm-11pm) which is usually a disaster for all involved. I should also mention that my store is A+/AA volume, so we get hit really hard on weekends and we never come clean on weekends. I just wish that our ETL-OPS would even out the hours a bit more across the whole week, because that would lead to a much smoother process and the backroom on the weekends wouldn't be such a hellhole. I can understand her thought process, however. Schedule more people during the week when CAFs are light to work on ELAs, purges, aisle updating, and generally recover from the weekend. Where that falls apart is when something happens that disrupts this process (call outs, overnight not coming clean, unexpectedly large CAFs/Workload, etc) and then all of a sudden we are set back one or more days and we have to play a game of catch up. And if this happens on a thursday/friday, well guess what you don't have the team members to fix it so the backroom will be even worse off than it would have been before. With SFS, it's typical to see 5-6 TMs per day working M-F, while there will only be 3 or rarely 4 on the weekends, which just seems shortsighted to me.
And while this philosophy might make some kind of sense in the Backroom where nothing is truly ever finished, in SFS our workload has a finite end point when all of today's workload has been done and all of the tomorrow orders that have dropped have been picked and packed. SFS can't really get ahead of the game by throwing more people at it, so it makes more sense to evenly distribute the hours across the week. This is especially true when the workload doesn't fluctuate much on a day to do basis, which seems to be the case at my store. By evenly distributing the hours, you can more or less guarantee that SFS will come clean. And on days that have an extreme number of orders, there is usually someone that can be borrowed from the salesfloor or an ETL that can help pack to ensure that we meet the goal times.