The niche of retail is highly profitable and in demand, yet it has multiple hidden pitfalls which can lead to low efficiency in retail management. There’s no need to fear them as retail management tips by Shifton may help you tackle the challenges on your path to achieving the highest efficiency in retail management workflow.
The first thing to consider for an effective manager in retail is that this line of business requires you to manage a diverse range of elements and processes daily. Consider it a continuous water flow you need to manage. This flow includes overseeing all store employees, delegating multiple tasks to them, managing how they’re completed, and simultaneously being part of a team for synergy. Sounds a bit fanciful? It’s real when you have informational support and know how to synergise 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 which tasks do they perform?
A retail manager is someone who manages a retail store, assists with management, or oversees a certain department. Since retail stores can vary in size from small businesses with a few hundred feet of storefronts to large warehouses, shopping centres, and supermarkets owned by massive corporations, the duties and tasks of a retail manager can vary. Moreover, they also vary from day to day depending on the current load on a selling point or a department, customer flow, and even seasonality.
Yet, most commonly, being a retail manager includes the following retail staff management tasks:
- arranging the store environment to make it ergonomic and appealing to customers;
- managing store employees, their tasks, and outcomes;
- maintaining and tracking goods available in stock;
- tracking, mitigating, and preventing shoplifting losses;
- customer service which relies on your assistance;
- tracking sales over set periods and providing reports to higher executives.
In short, a retail manager is an employee responsible for the overall functionality and effectiveness of a selling point.
How to be a good retail manager
We offer you a few tips that suit retail managers of any type and at any size of business, providing resultative retail staff management when applied.
Retail scheduling is a must!
Your selling point should work like clockwork to bring in profit. For this, you need your personnel to start their work on time and work in sync. Thus, even for a small grocery store, you need to provide proper retail scheduling. And regular and logical shifts in supermarkets or shopping centres are indeed a real must.
Although scheduling in the retail industry can be a headache, the solution is simple and is embodied in modern retail scheduling software. With it, you don’t need to keep gigantic data masses in mind or write them in tables on paper to decide on time-off requests, holidays, emergencies, peak times, quiet times, sick days, etc. Instead, you use an automated tool, and you can fill in new variables and data on the go.
Using a proper retail scheduler, you can perform multiple tasks at once.
- Determining the best combination of employees for each shift to make their work as efficient and customer-friendly as possible. 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 optimise shift work schedules in a couple of moves, and you create optimal shift schedules instantly.
- Distribution of schedules and shifts is also up to retail employee scheduling software. Your team has access to the dashboard in the app, and they can easily get info about when their shift is or propose changes if they have some hurdles. You can organise everything in the cloud so that it’s available anywhere, anytime, and alerts your retail team instantly of any provided changes. Each employee can propose schedule changes, independently swap shifts, and receive alerts of work schedule changes
The best thing about employee scheduling software for retail is that it automates everything 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 assignment of shifts to employees, including overtime.
Retail manager tasks
Task management is also part of the retail staff management routines. You need to highlight daily tasks, decide on their executors, track their completion, and report on the results. The good news is that 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 aside from that, you can plan your days and provide checklists for yourself so as not to miss anything. You can set priorities, control the completion of each assignment, and provide notifications about crucially important tasks and timelines for both you and your staff.
Use effective time management
When we said that a retail point should work like clockwork, it was about effective time management too. If your shop assistants are constantly late, couriers don’t manage timely deliveries, or your warehouse staff forgets about resupplying stocks, what happens then? A true disaster! Yet it can also be automated to mitigate the risks that we listed. You need to apply time and attendance management software for retail. Shifton offers this opportunity in its scheduling software for large retail businesses. The same refers to periods of downtime where there are fewer customers, and most employees are not engaged in workflow. Good time management is what allows you to provide flexible solutions for your team: when you need them to start working, when you need to have more staff in the store to cope with a surge in customers, and when you can give them days off without adversely affecting the store’s efficiency. Just try to provide time management in Shifton, and you may be surprised at 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 manage a large department to delegate recruiting and headhunting tasks, and you can use retail scheduling software to control each worker's efficiency to replace them if they don’t meet your requirements or are slacking off.
Use retail scheduling software
As you can see, multiple retail management routines can be made easier with retail employee scheduling software. With this software, you provide higher results in the following areas:
- managing employee scheduling;
- analysing daily sales;
- tracking employee time off;
- providing effective task management for you and each employee.
From a broader perspective, it can help you build an effective management strategy and set goals for each selling point that are achievable and logical.
Focus on your store's traffic
Traffic in a selling point is what indicates its profitability. You can use software to count customers and export reports about busy times. By knowing your store's traffic and when you're the busiest, you can be more prepared and prevent emergencies on peak dates, for instance, holidays, Black Fridays, or sales times. It can help you schedule adequate staff for your expected amount of customers and avoid arranging major organisational tasks or stocking for times when the store will be bustling with customers.
Provide instant data tracking
Retail management is based on numbers: sales, visitors, goods in stock, sold goods, income, and maintenance expenses form the whole workflow. All this data requires your attention and accurate calculation. Manually, it’s a tough job, but it still has to be done. When you use retail scheduling software, you can keep all data in one place, operate it, and provide reports that show your management results in numbers.
What data to check and process?
- Customer numbers;
- Sales levels;
- Number of sold goods in specified periods;
- Working hours for each employee;
- Overtime;
- Peak hours in your store.
Then you can operate this data to analyse the whole work and improve it when needed.
How to improve the management of a retail team?
Efficient team management in the retail industry 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 specifics. Don’t be afraid to try some of them to decide on 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. Besides, don’t 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 remain stuck in your office space. Exchange shifts, weekends, and sick days online to save time and stay mobile.
- Motivate your employees with overtime bonuses – you can easily calculate them in employee scheduling software.
- Work with breaks to prevent overlapping breaks in your team. Create pre-scheduled breaks or set limits on the number and duration of breaks to ensure the store always has enough staff to offer customer service.
- Manage attendance to know when a person actually starts and ends their shift. If you notice some staff are frequently late, you can apply penalties for poor performance, just as you calculate bonuses.
Simplify Scheduling
With a strong employee communication app, you can more efficiently roster employees in the following ways:
- Assign staff shifts based on job role and availability.
- Utilise 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 instantly accept or reject shifts directly from their mobile devices.
- Include shift tasks, notes, and even files within the schedule so employees know precisely what to do when they arrive at work.
- Complete oversight of collaborative staff scheduling in real-time, even while on the go.
Being an effective retail manager isn't a mission impossible, whether managing a small shop or a full-fledged retail department. Just remember your efficiency relies on three pillars, which are as follows:
- Thorough planning and time management.
- Effective recruiting to build the best team.
- Impeccable employee scheduling software that assists with most routine tasks daily.
If the first two are mainly your responsibility, Shifton can provide you with the third pillar to streamline your management workflow, making it time-saving and effective.
