All-Star Team (The Retail Edit)

It’s no secret that one of the biggest challenges in retail is managing the ever ‘revolving door’ of workers. One study suggested turnover in retail averages at 25% (behind only the hotel, catering and leisure sector at 46% and transport and storage at 26%).

With few players staying for the long-term, how do you create a happy, high performing, goal-driven and cooperative workforce – or the all-star team?

Working with businesses across the UK, we’ve come across four ways in which retailers are using our feature-rich EPOS system to better manage, develop and monitor team performance.

Set and monitor goals

Having goals helps people to feel motivated and generally raises productivity. As a retailer you’ll most likely want to give your staff sales-related goals like sales per shift, sales per hour, average transaction values, loyalty scheme sign ups or cross-sells.

But, creating goals brings another challenge – how to monitor staff performance?

By clocking in your employees to its system and producing a range of intelligent reports, the Good Till EPOS system can help you to easily collect data about how each employee is progressing with their targets.

With such data at your fingertips, it’s a simple step to identifying and rewarding your top performers (e.g. through a commission or bonus framework); identifying those who may need some additional coaching or support to raise their achievement level; and setting realistic benchmarks for the future

Achieve product familiarity

If customers walk into your shop looking for some assistance but find staff who seem to know little or nothing about the products they’re selling, then the damage is done right there. You’re unlikely to make a sale and unlikely to ever see them (or anyone they know) ever again!

Ensuring staff are familiar with your products is so important and luckily, your smart EPOS can help again. One way could be having handheld/ mobile tablets which allow staff out on the shop floor to look up product specifications in a flash. Another way might be to use the integrated stock management feature alongside a rotating schedule of stock management duties – meaning everyone takes a turn at working directly on inventory, improving their product knowledgeability at the same time.

Keep time

Time is a precious commodity and, for the retail industry, it’s vital that you keep track of staff hours and optimise staffing schedules to deal with highs and lows in daily or seasonal traffic. Everything has to run like clockwork.

A Good Till makes light work of this!

You can use its clocking in/ out features to track/ monitor timekeeping among staff and to promote accountability.

And, if you’re using data reports to identify your top performers and busiest sales periods, it’s then easy to work out when you’ll have to schedule extra staff and create rotas that ensure you always have one of your best performers on the team.

Promote happiness

Finally, remember your employees are one of your most valuable assets and the saying goes that ‘happy staff’ equals ‘happy customers’ and that equals a ‘happy bank balance’ for your business.

So, how do you ensure your employees are happy at work? As we mentioned before, setting work-related goals and a reward system goes someway to improving motivation but there’s much more you can do. Taking some time to find out and understand what personal goals your staff have, can be a real game changer. Perhaps you’ll find that an employee needs flexibility due to an exam/ study schedule and could use your EPOS system to quickly adjust the rota. Or, perhaps you’ll discover a member of staff that’s interested in taking their retail career into merchandising and could offer them some additional training around product-linking within the EPOS.

Effectively leading your employees so that they become your ‘all-star team’ may well take a bit more than what we’ve covered in this article – there’s the whole issue of recruitment to deal with for one thing. However, with the Good Till on board and these four tips to hand, the challenge just got a little easier.

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