Retail management tips that will take your business to the top

The niche of retail is highly profitable and in demand, yet it has numerous hidden pitfalls that can lead to low efficiency in retail management. There is no need to fear them as retail management tips by Shifton may help you handle the challenges on your way to the highest-efficiency retail management workflow. The first thing to consider for an effective manager in retail is that this business requires you to manage a diverse range of items and processes daily. Consider it an incessant flow of water you need to manage. This flow includes overseeing all store employees, delegating various tasks to them, managing their completion, whilst being part of a team to provide synergy. Sounds a bit fantastic? 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 assist you.

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

A retail manager is someone who manages a retail store, assists with management, or manages a certain department. Since retail stores can vary in size from small businesses with a few hundred feet of storefronts to large warehouses, malls, and supermarkets owned by huge corporations, the duties and tasks of a retail manager can vary. Moreover, they can 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 attractive for customers;
• managing store employees, their tasks, and results;
• maintaining and tracking inventory available;
• 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 brief, 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 couple of tips that suit retail managers of any type and size of business and provide effective retail staff management when applied.

Retail scheduling is a must!

Your selling point should work like clockwork to bring profit. For this, you need your personnel to start their work on time and work simultaneously. Thus, even for a small grocery store, you need to provide proper retail scheduling. And regular and logical shifts in supermarkets or malls are essential. Although scheduling in the retail industry can be a nightmare, the solution is simple and embodied in modern retail scheduling software. With it, you do not need to keep huge amounts of data in mind or write them in tables on paper to decide on time-off requests, holidays, emergencies, busy times, slack times, or sick times, etc. Instead, you use an automated tool and can fill in new variables and data on the go. Using a proper retail scheduler, you can perform multiple tasks simultaneously.

• Deciding on the best combination of employees for each shift to make their work the 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 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 is their shift or propose changes if they encounter some obstacles. You can organise everything in the cloud so that it’s available anywhere, anytime, and alerts your retail team instantly of any changes provided. Each employee can propose changes to the schedule, independently swap shifts, receive alerts of work schedule changes

The best aspect of 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 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 besides, 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 retail points should work like clockwork, it was about effective time management too. If your shop assistants are constantly late, couriers do not manage timely delivery, or your warehouse staff forgets about supplying stocks, what happens then? A true disaster! However, 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 applies during 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 intense customer flow, and when you can provide them with days off without sacrificing store’s efficiency. Just try to provide time management in Shifton, and you may be surprised by how easy it is when automated and streamlined.

Hire a high-quality team

Your store’s or department’s effectiveness 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 the efficiency of each worker to replace them if they are not meeting your requirements or appear to be underperforming.

Use retail scheduling software

As you can see, multiple retail management routines can be eased by retail employee scheduling software. With this software, you achieve higher results in the following areas:

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

From a wider 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 at peak dates, i.e., on holidays, Black Fridays, or sales times. It can help you schedule adequate staff for your expected number of customers and avoid arranging large organisational tasks or restocking for times when the store will be full of 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 daunting task, but it still needs 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;
• Overworking;
• Peak hours in your store.

Then you can operate this data to analyse the whole work and enhance 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. Do not hesitate 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, 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.
• Do not remain stuck in your office place. Exchange shifts, weekends, and sick days online to save time and remain mobile.
• Motivate your employees with overtime bonuses – you can easily calculate them in 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 ensure that the in-store environment will always have enough staff to provide customer service.
• Work with attendance to understand when a person actually starts and ends their shift. If you detect some of your personnel are consistently late, you can impose penalties for poor performance in the same way you calculate bonuses.

Simplify Scheduling

With a robust employee communication app, you can schedule employees more efficiently 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 devices.
• Include shift tasks, notes, and even files within the schedule so employees know exactly what to do upon arriving at work.
• Complete oversight of collaborative staff scheduling in real-time whilst on the go.

Being an effective retail manager is not a mission impossible, whether managing a small store 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 build the best team.
• Flawless employee scheduling 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 simpler, time-saving, and effective.