With the increase of online shopping and a shift toward grocery delivery and pick-up services, efficient management in the grocery sector is more complicated than ever.
As grocers adopt new ways of working and as customer expectations change, corporate leaders and managers at all levels need tools that will help them communicate with and manage employees in new and more streamlined ways.
Corporate offices need to be able to communicate directly with employees at all levels. District managers need tools to support multi-branding and compliance with local union requirements. Departmental leads and store managers need an organized and simple way to cover shifts and oversee complex operations.
These tools are available with WorkJam, a digital workplace platform that offers a suite of modules to help grocery companies manage their workers and workflows with efficiency and ease.
One example of how WorkJam can help employees and managers better handle store operations is the app’s Open Shift Marketplace. This tool allows employees to take control of their schedules; they can drop, trade, and pick up shifts within their home store, other stores, or other departments with a few clicks in the app. Managers can avoid back-and-forth negotiations over such arrangements, only getting involved to approve employees’ desired and mutually-agreed-upon changes.
Another way that WorkJam works particularly well for grocery stores is its provision of on-demand digital training that allows workers to learn the many tasks involved in store operations at their own pace. With the digital workplace platform on their devices, employees can undergo training anywhere for a few minutes at a time.
For example, a new employee might take five minutes during a slow moment to complete the module on how to properly display produce. The training could require her to do an apple-stacking exercise to test her comprehension, and she could be instructed to send a photo of her stacked apples to her manager to get approval of the completed training. The manager marks the training module complete and awards her a digital badge within the app, which she can use toward certain rewards and as support for her next promotion.
Employees in a given department can easily do trainings for additional roles, allowing them to work in other areas of the store when there’s a need or to switch roles permanently. Such flexibility in training is typically not possible if managers have to spend the time to train employees individually. The complex and dynamic needs of a grocery store make this capability particularly useful.
Employees who can control their schedule and their training are much happier than those who struggle to get the shifts they want and aren’t able to improve their skills autonomously. Managers who don’t have to oversee every aspect of workers’ schedules and trainings are relieved to turn their attention to other tasks, protecting the industry’s slim margins. And corporate leaders are happy to be able to communicate directly with everyone in the company to share perspectives, vision, and announcements.
The WorkJam Digital Workplace is a powerful tool that can infuse every aspect of grocery operations with greater efficiency and ease. Read our grocery industry data sheet —WorkJam for Grocery— to learn many more ways that this platform can transform the way grocery companies operate.