Blog

Author
Aaron Xavier
Date
July 10, 2017

HAS THE RETAIL SECTOR BEEN MISSING OUT ON A KEY ELEMENT ALL ALONG?

The Retail industry faces new challenges every day due to the ever-changing nature of customer behaviour, human resource management and technology. Retail chains spend a huge amount of money towards training and hiring employees. As they play a vital role in the brand’s development. Often people who work in operations tend to change their jobs frequently as compared to other sectors. Here are the three most common challenges faced by retail sector

Here are the three most common challenges faced by retail sector:
1) High attrition rates –

Retail is infamous for having a high degree of employee turnover. Industries completely underestimate how much value a good operations team can add to their overall productivity and proficiency. When good employees leave, your turnover rates skyrocket, which in turn requires a greater investment of precious resources into recruiting, hiring, and training all over again.

2) Maintaining Employee Efficiency and Efficacy –

Fatigue, stressful working schedules and physically demanding nature of the retail business leads to the decrease in performance of employees over time. Employers constantly struggle to find ways to keep employees motivated at their work place. A motivated employee is an effective employee and when your brand is so intimately connected with their performance, you must make sure that your employees are equipped with enough tools to perform at their best.When employers fail to motivate employees they either give a mediocre performance or leave.

3) Diversity (ethnography), Misconceptions and Cohesiveness –

Building a staff of confident, dedicated and driven employees is one of the major challenges faced by employers. Retailers must address several misconceptions and misapprehensions related to the working hours, stress levels and salary expectations that an employee might have about the work environment. Even after doing so, the Employer may not be able to assure their employees and break through their pre-set notions. Employers may have to often work with a group of employees coming from various backgrounds and as such, often end up facing issues in creating a cohesive and robust team. This eventually leads to greater issues that often take tremendous amounts of time and resources to resolve.

Retailers often end up facing these challenges at some point or the other but rarely end up finding solutions to their prevalent human resource management challenges. One of the easiest way to reduce the associated risk and loss is standardization. Breaking down your brands goals into tasks and activities can bring about change in the ‘way of working’. The process of standardization, will empower employees significantly in adapting to the new job and its set of objectives. The benefits to employers are tremendous as this in turn leads to lower attrition rates and thus reduces recurrence of the cycle of recruiting, hiring, training and attrition. Eliminating ambiguity and vagueness in execution helps the employers attain higher levels of productivity quickly and easily. With set operating procedures from the very get go, the chances of employees making errors and mistakes are drastically reduced. Employers can ultimately achieve higher productivity rates and overall a store that performs efficiently and in the most optimal manner.

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