While competitive wages always help, flexibility around scheduling also plays a critical role in employee retention, according to a panel of retail labor managers at the National Retail Federation's (NRF) Big Show.
At the session sponsored by Kronos, Tom Finkel, workforce strategy and operations manager for Target, said it comes down to planning proactively, being flexible and being fair.
Around planning, he said Target "prides" itself on having schedules set two weeks — or at least 11 days — before the actual schedule starts to help associates best "plan their life around that."
From a flexibility standpoint, Target frequently cross trains its mostly part-time staff while "letting them know that the more they know, the more they can get scheduled if they're looking for those hours." But Target also makes sure ample flexibility around availability exists to best match associate's lifestyles.
Finally, Mr. Finkel says he looks for workforce management tools to help eliminate "those perceived biases of favoritism" and that the whole scheduling process becomes more transparent.
The panelists — including John Thrailkill, VP of store metrics & systems, customer support and business development, The Container Store, and Norm Diagle, manager, labor & productivity, Hannaford Bros. — said the goal of implementing workforce management solutions isn't so much cutting costs but more efficiently balancing staffing to traffic patterns and making sure the correct associates are working the store depending on the required tasks. Another critical goal is freeing up associates for more customer-facing roles and saving store managers a few hours a week from preparing schedules. But panelists cautioned that associates and particularly store managers need to buy-into the scheduling system.
Mr. Thrailkill said that any sophisticated scheduling shouldn't wind up "putting a machine" between the store manager and staff. While the tools aid in decision-making, managers should continue to know they ultimately sign off on the schedule. He likened the potential poor use of workforce management tools at the store level to a writer blaming Microsoft Word for a lousy writing effort.
"If you're not a good writer, you're not a good writer," stated Mr. Thrailkill. "The schedule's the same thing. If you don't have a good manager tweaking this thing and making sure it's right, it doesn't matter what tools you have. You're going to have employees who are upset."