By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
9/16/2008
This past year, the stories I’ve read in the mass and business media really have me scratching my head. The media seems to have gotten more sensationalist than ever, and presents what I can only describe as an “odd” slant on the news. Along those lines, I guess it’s our week to comment on stories from the Wall Street Journal.
I never thought I’d find myself to the right of anything in WSJ, but here I am. When an article is titled, “Retailers Reprogram Workers in Efficiency Push,” it catches my eye, especially when the one retailer highlighted runs high-touch, small-box specialty stores. In this case, the retailer under the scope is Ann Taylor, with a special focus on one store in Langhorne, PA. For those of you unfamiliar, Langhorne is in Bucks County, a nice upper-middle class world of McMansions. My sister lives nearby.
While relations between many supermarket employees and management have been less than cordial, specialty retail’s situation is much more straightforward. People come…and people go, typically with minimal animosity. Turnover in specialty retail hovers at over 100% per year. It has been so for a long time. But of course, if you’re reading this, you’re involved in retail and you know this already.
In fact, there are quite a few things we know that the article paints as….for want of a better word…sinful. Let’s make a list:
· In a high touch retail store, it makes sense to give those salespeople who sell the most the greatest opportunity to do that. Somehow, the WSJ found that offensive.
· Store managers have better things to do that sit with spreadsheets or whiteboards defining and divining schedules that match legal and personal requirements. Especially in a small-box, high touch specialty store where staffing is always minimal. Why not let the computer do that?
· Labor scheduling systems assign workers at 15 minute intervals, rather than ½ hour intervals. That does save the retailer money, and is minimally disruptive to employees.
Let’s Talk About Retention and Hugging Your People
Not surprisingly, according to the article, implementing the new WFM system has had little to no impact on employee turnover at Ann Taylor. Let’s face it, almost NOTHING has had an impact on employee turnover in retail stores. Now that would have been a good story. There’s a lot that could be said about that side of retail workforce management. Retention policies are non-existent. As my friend Greg Girard used to say and as I’ve repeated before, “Go into a room of executives. Pick the highest level….in any industry in the US. Ask those executives whose first job was in a retail store or distribution center to raise their hands. Invariably, 90% of the people in the room will do so. The obvious question: Retailers get first crack at the best talent in the country. How and why do they let that talent slip through their fingertips?” We know the answer has very little to do with their workforce management systems.
Still, Jack is right and as usual, he was prescient. Retailers are beginning to understand that you can’t drive customer centricity without empowered, reasonably happy employees. They are also starting to see that it’s silly to let all that talent slip through their fingers. And the hidden blessing in a down economy is retailers might get a slightly longer crack at that talent they previously let slip away. Jack’s book is on store shelves now, and I encourage retail Store Operations and Human Resource executives to give it a read.
All this begs the question: can a retailer, or any company, use a workforce management system and still manage to “hug their people”? The answer is, OF COURSE. As the title of this article suggests, the accent should be on management, not on force. Get the store manager out of the dreary task of scheduling employees, calculating allowable hours for under-age employees and acceptable hours for part-time retirees. Get him or her back onto the selling floor, interacting with customers and getting to know those employees.
RSR has done two annual benchmarks on the state of Workforce Management in retail and we’re about to embark upon our third. So far, the gist of our findings is:
· Retailers overestimate the ability of their store managers to generate accurate schedules. Far too often, they still provide rudimentary tools like spreadsheets and whiteboards to do the task.
· Retail Winners’ store managers spend far less time working on employee schedules than their underperforming peers. They have better tools to help them.
· Task management is rightly viewed as a powerful tool to monitor the status of tasks to be performed by stores, and the presence of the requisite materials and merchandise needed to perform those tasks (product, signage, planograms, etc). However, job functions tend to be poorly defined, limiting the ability of these systems to assign the right worker to the right job
Final Thoughts, Moving Back to the Center
This article started to the “right” of the WSJ, but we’re moving back to the center. We at RSR believe good workforce management and positive employee relations are not mutually exclusive. We walk that walk ourselves and “hug our own people.” While we might sometimes get burned, on the whole, we believe it’s worth the risk. We want anyone who works with us to enjoy the experience, and be productive as well. That doesn’t mean we don’t manage schedules, deliverables and pipelines. That’s just sound business practice. It does mean we bend over backwards to treat everyone we come in contact with as human beings. Not a lot of force, but a lot of management. And, at the end of the day, it’s not all that much work to do both.
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