Employee engagement and retention strategies for the retail sector

In challenging economic times, retaining your most talented and productive staff members will be a key priority. Given the typically high staff turnover in the retail sector, ensuring that your employees are sufficiently engaged with your core business strategies and making sure that they are incentivised to stay with your business in the long term will be particularly important.

Incentivisation does not just mean providing financial incentives. It is increasingly important to many employees that they work for an organisation that is responsible and where diversity and inclusion and flexible working are high on the agenda.

Whilst employers must acknowledge that every employee has unique needs and will be motivated by different things, there are nevertheless some basic principles that employers in the retail sector should be mindful of.

In this article, we explore six principles that will help to engage, motivate, and retain your workforce.

Communicate your vision and values at recruitment stage

Clearly communicating your company vision and values as well as specifics of the role and the benefits package will mean that recruits will be aware of what you are trying to achieve and will know exactly what to expect when they join. This is a good solid basis upon which to build a relationship going forwards.

Train your managers to be people managers.

While compelling benefits packages have their place, many companies forget the positive impact good management has on employees. Strong managers will have the skills to engage people at all levels and will take the time to understand what drives those working for them. This knowledge will help them to determine how to keep staff motivated and engaged. While these skills may come naturally to some, other managers may need additional support to develop them.

Make praise and recognition part of your culture.

Recognition is extremely important to people and therefore fundamental to keeping employees engaged. In an ideal world, real time praise and recognition should be an integral part of your continuous feedback culture. In reality though, many managers struggle to provide praise without it feeling cheesy and insincere. If that’s the case then it’s worth remembering that there are many other ways to deliver praise using technology, or just pre-populated emails. It doesn’t have to be a costly or complicated thing to get up and running.

Manage poor performers, but don’t forget the rest!

Leaving poor performance unchecked negatively impacts morale and engagement, so it’s important that it’s addressed. But beware, allowing poor performers to take up too much management time can mean performing staff receive less attention, simply because they don’t require (on the face of it) any additional support. Make sure you get the balance right.

Make your benefits package attractive and bespoke.

The key to getting a benefits package right, is to figure out what genuinely matters to (and so motivates) your staff. This is where we once again circle back to your managers, who will be able to inform you what your employees value. In our experience, it’s often the little things that matter.  An extra day off for your birthday, greater ability to choose your shift patterns / hours and a generous staff discount can all make an enormous difference. In addition, subsidising things that are important to staff inside or outside of work, for example uniform, equipment, technology, and gym membership can be invaluable as is allowing staff time off to volunteer or carry out some charitable work.

Employers in the retail sector can also trade off their brand when incentivising staff. For example, a fashion label may be able to offer a generous clothing allowance, or a cosmetics company may be able to offer its staff free product samples.

Analyse your data and use it!

Analyse internal and external data (from your benefits / pensions providers / HR systems) to see the level of take up of employee benefits and don’t be afraid to change your offering based on this data. Conduct exit interviews to explore why people are exiting the business. Don’t be afraid to ask exiting employees what you could have done to keep them. You can even ask them about the details of their new job offer to get a better insight into what your competitors are offering. You have nothing to lose by asking these questions and the information could prove extremely useful when benchmarking your offering against your competitors.

When it comes to employee retention and engagement, the key focuses for HR teams within the retail sector should be:

• Designing a recruitment strategy to incorporate your vision and values
• Creating detailed job adverts and job descriptions
• Developing a tailored on-boarding process to show investment in new joiners
• Designing and conducting surveys to identify your company’s vision and values
• Conducting internal and external benchmarking of your existing benefits package
• Supporting managers with issues relating to poor performance
• Designing and publishing a straightforward way for employees to share their ideas or discuss options for ways of working
• Conducting exit interviews to see why people are leaving, analysing, and report your findings

How we can help

The employment team at Cripps can support you with all the above so please do get in touch for more information.