Human resource is a retail business’ most critical success factor. With more and more focus on maximum customer satisfaction, retailers need to invest a lot in the workforce. Along with the increased budget, this also creates challenges of effective human resource management.
In an open atmosphere where customers have easy access to different platforms to share their feedback, only 2-3 negative reviews can pose threat to an employee’s job. In this situation, an HR’s responsibility has added significance for effective workforce management.
Among others, there are three common issues faced by every employer in the retail industry.
Building employee engagement
No matter how advanced retail industry has gone with the online stores and apps, human interaction is still an integral part of it for communication between customers and staff. Retail industry depends on the strong relationship with the concerned parties no matter it is online or offline. For this, you need to ensure complete engagement and attention of your workforce. To retain employees and encourage them for better productivity, the companies need to look for advanced solutions.
Transforming the workplace
Unlike other businesses, in retail you cannot follow the same approach to accomplish a task. You always need to come up with innovative ideas to impress customers and to win their trust. With the introduction of apps, there have been many transformations in store management in retail industry. Now the process of supply and delivery chains has changed that is really effective, quick and hassle free.
Though these transformations have made retailing easy, there are still some problems. The regular transformation in the workplace at times makes things difficult for the employees. Due to this, organizations are now forced to adopt a more sophisticated approach that gives more importance to the employees and considers them more than just an ‘input’ for the business. To make workplace transformation effective, the organizations are now building relations with the employees outside the structure of enterprise bargaining.
Flexibility and productivity
Flexibility is the need of the hour in this rapidly changing and global market. But ensuring this in relation to labor is really critical to harnessing the benefits of technical improvements. In order to drive and implement change effectively, organizations need to offer advanced solutions to their employees. This means, investment in advanced applications and platforms that make store handling and other tasks easy for the workforce.
The retail industry is one of the fastest growing domains. Ecommerce websites and other technologies have played a vital role in its growth, but these have also created more challenges for the employees. Handling so many customers, inventory, sheets, and records make the process like a nightmare. In such a situation, it is important that companies look for the solutions that give employees the freedom to accomplish the task as per their convenience.
Some companies like Wooqer understood these challenges and launched an innovative platform. This makes human interactions effective, profitable and productive for long-term success.