Retail management tips that will take your business to the top

The retail niche is highly profitable and in-demand, yet there are various hidden challenges that can lead to low retail management efficiency. There's no need to fear these as retail management tips by Shifton can help you tackle the challenges on your path to achieving the most efficient retail management workflow. The first thing to bear in mind for an effective retail manager is that this business requires you to manage a wide range of things and processes daily. Consider it as a continual water flow you must handle. This flow involves overseeing all store employees, delegating numerous tasks to them, managing their completion, and simultaneously being part of a team to create synergy. Sounds a bit fantastic? It becomes real when you have informational support and know how to synergize your retail team's work. Shifton offers the most effective retail staff management tips to assist you with this.

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 specific 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 major corporations, the duties and tasks of a retail manager can range widely. Furthermore, they also vary daily depending on the current load at the selling point or 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 make it ergonomic and appealing for customers;
• managing store employees, their tasks, and results;
• maintaining and tracking goods available in stock;
• tracking, mitigating, and preventing shoplifting losses;
• providing customer service which relies on your support;
• tracking sales over specified periods and providing reports to higher management.

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 which suit retail managers of any type and at any business size and provide effective retail staff management when applied.

Retail scheduling is essential!

Your selling point should operate with precision to generate profit. For this, you need your staff to start their work on time and work simultaneously. Thus, proper retail scheduling is necessary even for a small grocery store. Regular and logical shifts in supermarkets or malls are absolutely essential. Although scheduling in the retail industry can be a nightmare, the solution is simple and embodied in modern retail scheduling software. With this, you don't need to remember large data sets or write them in tables on paper to decide on time-off requests, vacations, emergencies, busy times, quiet times, sick leave, etc. Instead, you use an automated tool where you can input new variables and data on the go. Using an appropriate retail scheduler, you can perform multiple tasks simultaneously.

• Deciding on the best combination of employees for each shift to make their work as efficient and customer-friendly as possible. You can select teams for shifts based on their skills, hard work, and the synergy they share.
• A retail scheduler like Shifton streamlines the scheduling process by providing alerts and suggestions to help you avoid double-bookings, conflicts, and scheduling someone when they can't work. You optimise shift work schedules in a few moves, creating optimal shift schedules instantly.
• Distributing schedules and shifts is also managed via retail employee scheduling software. Your team can access the dashboard in the app and easily find out when their shifts are, or propose changes if they face obstacles. Everything can be organised in the cloud, accessible anywhere, anytime, and instantly alerting your retail team of any changes. Each employee can propose schedule changes, independently swap shifts, and receive alerts about 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 and work 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 a part of retail staff management routines. You need to outline daily tasks, decide on who will execute them, track their completion, and report on the outcomes. The good news is that you can use the same retail scheduler as retail task management software. It includes tasks you oversee for employees, and you can plan your days and create checklists for yourself to remember everything. You can prioritise, monitor the completion of each assignment, and provide notifications for crucial tasks and timelines for both you and your staff.

Apply effective time management

When we said your retail point should operate with precision, it also involves effective time management. If your shop assistants are constantly late, couriers can't manage timely deliveries, or your warehouse staff forgets to supply stock, what happens then? A complete disaster! Yet this too can be automated to reduce the risks we mentioned. Time and attendance management software for retail is necessary. Shifton provides this function in its scheduling software for large retail businesses. The same applies to downtime when customer numbers are low, and most employees aren't engaged in the workflow. Effective time management allows you to offer flexible solutions for your team: when to start work, when you need more staff in-store to handle intense customer flow, and when you can provide days off without losing store efficiency. Try time management with Shifton and you may be surprised by how easy it is when automated and streamlined.

Hire a skilled team

Your store's or department's effectiveness starts with your team. If you manage a large department, you can have assistant managers to delegate recruitment and headhunting tasks, and you can use retail scheduling software to control each worker's efficiency and replace them if they don't meet your requirements or work inadequately.

Employ retail scheduling software

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

• managing employees' schedules;
• analysing daily sales;
• tracking employee time off;
• offering 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 at a selling point indicates its profitability. Software can be used to count customers and export reports on busy times. By knowing your store's traffic and when it is busiest, you can be better prepared and prevent emergencies during peak times, such as holidays, black Fridays, or sales events. It helps schedule sufficient staff for the expected number of customers and avoids executing major organisational tasks or restocking during times when the store will be crowded with customers.

Ensure instant data tracking

Retail management relies on numbers: sales, visitors, goods in stock, sold goods, income, and maintenance expenses form the complete workflow. All this data requires your attention and precise calculation. Manually, it's a challenging task, but it still must be done. Using retail scheduling software allows you to keep all your data in one place, operate it, and produce reports that show your management results in numbers. What data should be checked and processed?

• Customer numbers;
• Sales levels;
• Number of sold goods over specific periods;
• Working hours for each employee;
• Overtime work;
• Peak hours in your store.

Then you can utilise this data to analyse the overall work and improve it when necessary.

How to enhance retail team management?

Efficient team management in the retail industry is vital for customer satisfaction and overall business success. Here are some additional tips:

• Provide an optimal scheduling template (like 2/2, 3/3, 1/3, 5/2), based on your store's specifics. Don't be afraid to trial different templates to find the most effective 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. Also, remember to track these tasks and provide checklists and task statuses. Shifton employee scheduling software offers all these functions.
• Send automatic push notifications and reminders to your staff to alert them and prevent missing shifts or deadlines.
• Don't get stuck in your office. Exchange shifts, weekends, and sick days online to save time and remain mobile.
• Motivate your employees with overtime bonuses – easily calculated with 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 in-store environment will always have enough staff to provide customer service.
• Work with attendance to understand when a person actually starts and ends the shift. If you detect some of your personnel are constantly late, you can impose penalties for poor performance 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 when they arrive at work.
• Complete oversight over collaborative staff scheduling in real time, all while on the go.

Being an effective retail manager is not 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 create 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 simplified, time-saving, and effective.