The retail sector is highly profitable and in demand, yet it contains several hidden pitfalls which can lead to inefficiencies in retail management. There’s no need to fear them as retail management tips by Shifton may help you tackle 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 things and processes daily. Consider it an ever-flowing stream you need to direct. This flow includes overseeing all store employees, delegating tasks to them, managing their completion, and being part of a team to provide synergy. Seems a bit fantastic? It’s real when you have information 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 what tasks do they perform?
A retail manager is someone who manages a retail store, assists with management, or manages a particular department. Since retail stores can range in size from small businesses with a few hundred feet of frontage to large warehouses, shopping centres, and supermarkets owned by major 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 sales 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 shop environment to make it ergonomic and attractive for customers;
- managing shop employees, their tasks, and results;
- maintaining and tracking goods available in stock;
- monitoring, mitigating, and preventing shoplifting losses;
- customer service which depends on your assistance;
- tracking sales over set periods and providing reports to senior executives.
In summary, a retail manager is an employee responsible for the overall functionality and effectiveness of a sales point.
How to be a good retail manager
We offer you a few tips which suit 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 bring profit. For this, you need your personnel to commence their work on time and work concurrently. Thus, even for a small grocery shop, you need to provide proper retail scheduling. Regular and logical shifts in supermarkets or shopping centres are indeed essential.
Although scheduling in the retail industry can be a nightmare, the solution is simple and is embodied in modern retail scheduling software. With it, you are not required to keep in mind vast amounts of data or write them in tables on paper to decide on time-off requests, holidays, emergencies, busy periods, quiet times, sick leave, etc. Instead, you use an automated tool and you can update it with new variables and data on the go.
Using a suitable 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 possess.
- 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 cannot work. You optimise shift work schedules in a few movements, and you create the optimal shift schedules instantly.
- Distribution of rosters and shifts is also up to retail employee scheduling software. Your team have access to the dashboard in the app and they can easily get info about their shift or propose changes if they encounter 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 feature in 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 a team as a whole. You can automatically create an optimal rotation schedule for shop assistants, cashiers, security personnel, loaders, and sales floor staff with automatic adjustment 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 those responsible, 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 to ensure nothing is missed. You can set priorities, control the completion of each assignment, and provide notifications about critically important tasks and timelines for both you and your staff.
Use effective time management
When we said the sales point should work like clockwork, it related to effective time management too. If your shop assistants are consistently late, couriers do not 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 retail for large businesses. The same applies 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 commence work, when you need to have more staff in the store to handle intense customer flow, and when you can provide them with days off without losses in the store’s efficiency. Try to implement time management in Shifton, and you may be surprised by how simple it is when automated and streamlined.
Hire a high-quality team
Your store or department’s effectiveness begins 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 are being lax in their duties.
Use retail scheduling software
As you can see, numerous 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 broader perspective, it can assist you in crafting an effective management strategy and establishing achievable and logical goals for each sales point.
Focus on your store’s traffic
Traffic in a sales point is a measure of 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 stocking during 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 entire workflow. All this data requires your attention and accurate calculation. Manually, it’s a daunting task, 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 figures.
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.
You can then utilise this data to analyse the entire operation and make improvements where necessary.
How to improve the management of a retail team?
Efficient team management in the retail sector 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 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, 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. 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 avoid simultaneous breaks in your team. Create pre-scheduled breaks or set limits on the number and duration of breaks to ensure that there will always be enough staff to provide customer service in a store environment.
- Monitor attendance to understand when a person actually starts and ends their shift. If you detect persistent lateness among your personnel, you can implement penalties for poor performance just as 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.
- Utilise drag and drop, assign shifts in bulk, set recurring shifts, create customisable templates, and even allow employees to claim available open shifts.
- 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 arrival at work.
- Complete oversight over collaborative staff scheduling in real time, all while on the go.
Being an effective retail manager is not a mission impossible, whether managing a small store or a fully-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.
