LONDON – 11 March 2020 - Yesterday, HR Leaders from retailers such as IKEA, Ted Baker and Homebase gathered at BRC Learning Live to gain insights into the dramatic and rapid transformation that the industry is undergoing. As an associate member of British Retail Consortium and with the theme of the evening revolving around how to build your future workforce it was a given for Quinyx to join in on the discussions.
With 59% of employees feeling that retail has a poor image, senior leaders recognise that they must take ownership of employee career progression, helping them advance from Shopfloor to Boardroom.
So what did we learn during the event? Here are 3 key themes that were identified during the evening:
1. Recruit and retain top talent
Competition for talent is fierce in today’s global economy, so retailers must implement strategies to recruit, develop and retain a diverse workforce.
To start, retailers need to improve their image as an attractive, secure, long-term career choice. How to do it? By putting new digital technologies and innovations in place, retailers can:
- Respond to employees’ need, possibly even requirement, for flexibility
- Engage with employees where convenient
- Decrease turnover rates with regular and timely feedback
- Decrease time spent on admin, increasing facetime with customers
2. Revisit roles and skills required
Retail is restructuring, triggering a shift in the retail workforce whereby jobs are being created that require a whole new set of skills and capabilities.
Retailers can use this as an opportunity to build a competitive advantage, empowering and upskilling employees so that they have more of a purpose in the workplace.
This also plays nicely with the idea that the role of the store is changing, becoming more of an experience or knowledge centre where more is required of employees.
3. Drive and embed workforce transformation
Retailers must quickly respond to shifts in consumer and employee behaviours and expectations. They must also have a clear strategy agreed by a central team, a top down communication plan and alignment across all impacted teams.
New technologies and innovations, especially related to digitisation and automation, can then facilitate this transformation, ensuring good adoption rates, successful implementations and a smooth transition to steady state.
Author: Shauna Maney
Interested in learning more about how Quinyx can help your retail business? Don't hesitate to reach out to me directly at shauna.maney@quinyx.com.