Hilding Anderson, senior director and retail strategy lead for Publicis Sapient, says store associates need more power. To accomplish that, retailers need, “strategic agility…Organizations of the future have to have smaller, agile teams, working across silos.” He cites Walmart and Target as doing it, but believes even they haven’t gone far enough yet. Anderson says a retailer’s organizational chart should have, “flat, wide distributed responsibility, moving authority to the team and moving it down.” Mike Webster, SVP and general manager at Oracle, says technology is about “going from best practice to next practice.” In this case, that means putting technology in the hands of the store associate. That reduces turnover, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction and ultimately increases sales and profits.
We are living in an era of rising labor costs and low unemployment and that makes finding and keeping great store associates harder and harder. Leaders agree that people are the difference between success and failure in retail stores and yet the world of retail technology is nearly silent on the topic. At the most recent Big Show, you could hardly find anyone discussing it. At the most recent eTail conference, there were no exhibits presenting software for store associates. Very few people are focused on it and that’s why it’s a big opportunity for the small number of players who are thinking about it now.
Help Is On The Way
There are now some companies whose software focuses on store employees and frames the conversation about technology and store associates in new ways. Steven Kramer, CEO of Workjam, summed up what that technology can do. Workjam’s software is built for the “nondesk workforce.” Those employees, he says, use their smartphone in every relationship they have but for some reason, the work environment is an exception. “Frontline employees…want a digital relationship with their employer as they do in every other relationship,” he says. But, “there’s been no innovation in HR and systems related to frontline employee management. For example, there are still binders in break rooms full of printed materials for training retail store employees.” Customers of Workjam, like Ulta and Shell, use employees’ mobile devices for clocking in/out, managing schedules, picking up shifts through an open shift marketplace, training, communication and task management—automating what have always been manual processes and making it much more employee-friendly.
Read the full article, here: www.forbes.com
