In-store retail is no longer solely about sales. That’s what online is for - convenient, effortless, simple. In-store, however, is about brand immersion, experience, and customer service. And who delivers all of this? Well, in the first instance, it’s your store teams.
Your team members are your brand advocates, and they can genuinely be one of your strongest competitive advantages. Engaging and retaining your teams is important - here are three ways in which better scheduling can help.
How to engage and motivate your shop-floor teams with retail scheduling
1. Improved employee morale through workload consistency
Better scheduling means matching your in-store employee numbers to the demand you expect in the shop at any given time. In doing so, your shops will never be under- or overstaffed. Our research shows that four in 10 retailers often wrongly predict the number of staff needed in-store. 47% of retailers explicitly told us that not being able to predict the number of team members needed had a negative impact on employee morale.
A transparent demand model, where peaks and troughs in demand directly impact planned staffing, can help team members have more consistent and manageable workloads.
2. Empowered employees - giving team members more ownership of their hours
Top-down scheduling practices are outdated. Instead, sustainable, data-informed and interactive scheduling software can empower team members to have a say in how their hours are allocated. Employees can input their availability and preferences, all of which are taken into account by dynamic scheduling algorithms. Each employee’s perfect work-life balance will be different - the only way to accommodate is to give team members more ownership of their hours.
Via the Rotageek mobile app, team members can:
- View who they are working with
- Take additional shifts
- Swap shifts
- Manage annual leave
- Check-in & out of work
- Mark their availability and preference
3. In-built fairness
At Rotageek, we believe that fairness should underpin everything. With anything we develop, a significant amount of time is spent thinking about how to make it fair. The problem is that in many ways fairness might seem different to each person - so it’s a difficult thing to achieve. However, we empower team members to express their work preference, and managers to set requirements for their business.
What’s more, Rotageek helps limit bias and favouritism.
Engaging, motivating, and empowering your teams to do a great job is difficult, but it should be top of the agenda. By thinking more holistically about teams, and implementing fair, interactive, and data-driven technology to empower employees, you’ll be best positioned to retain your team members and empower them to deliver excellent customer service every day.
Find out more about Rotageek's scheduling software, built for leading global retailers.
