Retail management tips that will take your business to the top

The retail sector is highly lucrative and in demand, yet it has several hidden pitfalls that can lead to inefficiencies in retail management. There's no need to fear them as retail management tips from Shifton can help you tackle the challenges on your way to achieving the most efficient retail management workflow. The first thing an effective retail manager should consider is that this business requires you to manage a diverse range of tasks and processes daily. Think of it as a non-stop flow of water you need to control. This involves overseeing all store employees, delegating various tasks to them, managing their completion, and simultaneously being part of a team to foster synergy. Sound a bit out there? It’s real when you have informational support and know how to synergize your retail team’s work. Shifton shares the most effective retail staff management tips to help you with that.

What is a retail manager and what tasks do they perform?

A retail manager manages a retail store, assists with management, or oversees a specific department. Since retail stores can range from small businesses with a few hundred feet of storefronts to large warehouses, malls, and supermarkets owned by big corporations, the duties and tasks of a retail manager can vary. Moreover, they vary from day to day depending on the current load on a sales point or a department, customer flow, and even seasonality. Yet, most commonly, being a retail manager involves the following retail staff management tasks:

• arranging the store environment to be ergonomic and appealing to customers;
• managing store employees, their tasks, and outcomes;
• maintaining and tracking goods available in stock;
• monitoring, mitigating, and preventing shoplifting losses;
• providing customer service that relies on your assistance;
• tracking sales over set periods and providing reports to higher executives.

In brief, a retail manager is someone responsible for the overall functionality and effectiveness of a sales point.

How to be a good retail manager

We offer you a couple of tips that apply to retail managers of any type and at any size of business and provide effective retail staff management when applied.

Retail scheduling is essential!

Your sales point should operate like clockwork to be profitable. For this, you need your staff to start their work on time and work synchronously. So, even for a small grocery shop, you need to implement proper retail scheduling. Regular and logical shifts in supermarkets or malls are an absolute must. Although scheduling in the retail industry can be a headache, the solution is simple and lies in modern retail scheduling software. With it, you don't need to remember vast amounts of data or jot them down on paper tables to decide on time-off requests, vacations, emergencies, busy times, quiet times, sick days, etc. Instead, you use an automated tool to input new variables and data as needed. Using a proper retail scheduler, you can handle multiple tasks simultaneously.

• Deciding on the best combination of employees for each shift to make their work most efficient and customer-friendly. You can select teams for the shift based on their skills, hard work, and the synergy they have.
• A retail scheduler like Shifton streamlines the scheduling process by providing alerts and suggestions so you can avoid double-bookings, conflicts, and scheduling someone when they can’t work. You can optimize shift work schedules in just a few moves, creating optimal shift schedules instantly.
• Distribution of schedules and shifts is also managed by retail employee scheduling software. Your team has access to the dashboard in the app and can easily find out when their shifts are or propose changes if they face obstacles. You can organise everything in the cloud so it’s available anywhere, anytime, and instantly alerts your retail team to any changes. Each employee can propose changes to the schedule, independently swap shifts, and receive alerts of work schedule changes.

The great thing about employee scheduling software for retail is that it automates anything that can be automated, from shift assignments to salary calculations and working hours calculations for each employee and the team as a whole. You can automatically create an optimal rotation schedule for shop assistants, cashiers, guards, loaders, and sales floor staff, with automatic coordination of shift changes and assigning shifts to employees including overtime.

Retail manager tasks

Task management is also a part of retail staff management routines. You need to highlight daily tasks, decide who will execute them, track their completion, and report on the results. The good news is you can use the same retail scheduler as retail task management software. It includes tasks you need to delegate to the employees you manage, and you can also plan your days and provide checklists for yourself so as not to miss anything. You can set priorities, monitor the completion of each assignment, and provide notifications about crucial tasks and timelines for both you and your team.

Use effective time management

When we said your sales point should work like clockwork, we also meant effective time management. If your shop assistants are constantly late, couriers can't manage timely deliveries, or your warehouse team forgets about stock supply, what then? A complete mess! Yet this too can be automated to mitigate the risks we've mentioned. You need to apply time and attendance management software for retail. Shifton offers this feature in its retail scheduling software for large businesses. The same applies to periods of downtimes when there are fewer customers, and most employees are not engaged in workflow. Good time management lets you provide flexible solutions for your team: when you need them to start work, when you need more staff in the store to handle heavy customer flow, and when you can give them days off without affecting the store’s efficiency. Just try implementing time management in Shifton, and you might be surprised by how easy it is when automated and streamlined.

Hire a high-quality team

The effectiveness of your store or department starts with your team. You can have some assistant managers if you're managing a large department to delegate recruiting and headhunting tasks, and you can use retail scheduling software to monitor the efficiency of each worker to replace them if they're not meeting your standards or are slacking off.

Utilise retail scheduling software

As you can see, many retail management routines can be simplified with retail employee scheduling software. With this software, you can achieve higher results in areas such as:

• managing employee scheduling;
• analyzing daily sales;
• tracking employee time off;
• providing effective task management for you and each employee.

From a broader perspective, it helps you build an effective management strategy and set achievable and logical goals for each sales point.

Focus on your store's traffic

Traffic in a sales point indicates its profitability. You can use software to count customers and export reports on busy times. By knowing your store's traffic and when you're busiest, you can be better prepared for peak dates, like holidays, Black Fridays, or sales periods, and prevent emergencies. This helps you allocate adequate staff for the expected amount of customers and avoid scheduling large organisational tasks or restocking for times when the store will be full of customers.

Provide instant data tracking

Retail management is numbers-based: sales, visitors, stock levels, sold goods, revenue, and maintenance costs form the entire workflow. All this data requires your attention and precise calculation. Manually, it's an arduous task, but still necessary. When you use retail scheduling software, you can keep all data in one place, operate it, and provide reports that quantify your management results. What data should you check and process?

• Customer numbers;
• Sales figures;
• Number of items sold in specified periods;
• Working hours for each employee;
• Overtime work;
• Peak hours in your store.

Then you can use this data to analyse the overall work and improve it when needed.

How to enhance the management of a retail team?

Effective team management in retail can make all the difference in customer satisfaction and overall business success. Here are some additional tips:

• Provide the best scheduling template (like 2/2, 3/3, 1/3, 5/2) depending on your store’s specific needs. Don't be afraid to try some of them to determine the best one.
• Set clear tasks and notify your staff about them. You can create task assignments for employees in a cloud environment using the retail scheduler. Do not forget to track these tasks, and provide checklists and task statuses for them. Shifton employee scheduling software provides you with all these functions.
• Send automatic push notifications and reminders to your staff to alert them and prevent missing shifts or outdated assignments.
• Don’t just stay cooped up in the office. Exchange shifts, weekends, and sick days online to save time and stay mobile.
• Motivate your employees with overtime bonuses—these can easily be calculated using employee scheduling software.
• Work with breaks to avoid simultaneous breaks in your team. Create pre-scheduled breaks or set limits on the number and duration of breaks to guarantee that there will always be enough staff in the store to provide customer service.
• Work with attendance to understand when a person actually starts and ends the shift. If you notice some of your staff are consistently late, you can impose penalties for poor performance in the same way you calculate bonuses.

Simplify Rostering

With a robust employee communication app, you can more efficiently roster employees in the following ways:

• Assign staff shifts based on job role, and availability.
• Use drag and drop, assign shifts in bulk, set recurring shifts, create customisable templates, and even allow employees to claim open shifts available.
• Automated push notifications so employees can immediately accept or reject shifts directly from their mobile phones.
• Include shift tasks, notes, and even files within the roster so employees know exactly what to do upon arrival at work.
• Complete oversight over collaborative staff rostering in real-time all while on the go.

Being an effective retail manager is not an impossible mission, whether managing a small shop or a full-fledged retail department. Just remember that your efficiency is based on three pillars, which are as follows:

• Thorough planning and time management.
• Effective recruiting to create the best team.
• Flawless employee rostering software helps with most routine tasks daily.

If the first two are mostly your responsibility, Shifton can provide you with the third pillar to make your management workflow simplified, time-saving, and effective.