Retailers continue to face a tricky challenge: turnover. In retail, turnover averages over 60%, with, part-time roles reaching 70-80%. Unchecked turnover significantly impacts employee retention in retail, creating a staffing crisis that endangers employees and consumers and damages their shopping experiences. Shoplifting incidents are up, and 72% of retail workers have experienced threatening incidents due to understaffing.
By understanding the younger workforce’s priorities and offering competitive solutions, retail operators can rebuild strong, resilient teams for the market of today and tomorrow. In this article, we’ll share the 4 key steps to boost your employee retention in retail and elevate your employee satisfaction.
A Positive Work Environment
Often, poor workplace culture is a driving motivation for retail departures due to employees feeling a lack of jack satisfaction. Employees having a poor sense of purpose for their work (27%) or feeling that managers and the company are overlooking their health and well-being needs (29%) make a workplace inhospitable. Creating and maintaining a positive workplace culture makes employees more satisfied and more loyal.
Recognition and appreciation are huge motivators in the workplace. Managers are also central creators of workplace culture. Ensure your managers recognize and reward employee work. Recognition can include but isn’t limited to:
- Monetary bonuses.
- Employee of the month awards.
- Verbal or written thanks for their work.
Consistent, varied recognition encourages employees to truly do their best. When you offer a culture that respects and rewards employees’ time and effort, you will net more long-term candidates and boost employee efficiency.
Competitive Employment Benefits
Millennials and Gen Z make up an increasing majority of the workforce, prioritizing good pay, secure benefits, and a respectful and positive workplace culture. A lack of flexible scheduling (34%) and poor compensation (29%) drive a lot of their turnover:
Employee benefits also include things like good work-life balance and the chance to be upskilled or promoted. Limited career advancement opportunities caused about 32% of employees to depart. 94% of employees would stay longer if their company invested more in their careers. 76% of employees are actively seeking career expansion opportunities, and retention is 34% higher when professional development opportunities are provided.
4 Steps to Improve Retail Hiring and Boost Retention
There are 4 steps to implementing a more strategic hiring approach to boost employee retention in retail, the bulk of which is increasingly Millennials and Gen Z. Understanding what these generations value in a workplace gives you a roadmap to showing them why they should apply and stick around.
Step 1: Offer more competitive benefits.
Increased wages increase employee motivation and engagement because employees see that their effort is paying off with fairer compensation. Offering healthcare benefits and highlighting those perks when posting job openings attracts more Millennial and Gen Z candidates and fosters greater employee loyalty. Competitive benefits also bring in better qualified candidates because the candidates with greater soft and hard skills will be more interested in jobs with competitive compensation.
Step 2: Provide strong work-life balance.
Predictable, flexible scheduling is crucial for many Millennial and Gen Z candidates who are often finishing high school, attending university, or raising a family. Having a clear divide between work and personal time makes all employees more motivated, more efficient, and better rested–a recipe for boosted performance, stronger teamwork, and a brighter look for consumers.
Step 3: Promote growth and development opportunities.
Providing professional growth opportunities gives your employees more reasons to invest long-term in your company and lets you ensure that top quality candidates fill every role. Train your employees on leadership, upskill them to keep up with the latest technology or automation changes, and give them chances for team building. Promote from within, and you’ll have a leg up in establishing and maintaining a strong, positive workplace culture that generates employee and consumer satisfaction and loyalty.
Step 4: Cultivate a company culture of appreciation.
Your teams become more productive when you heed employee feedback, offer consistent recognition, and build cohesive teamwork and communication. Moreover, a work environment this healthy and tight-knit produces employees who are much more likely to share these work opportunities with their friends, giving you a new community connection from which to source new employees.
Conclusion
Reducing retail’s high turnover requires you to implement competitive offerings that align with Millennial and Gen Z values, such as fair compensation, professional growth, and a supportive work culture. To cultivate a positive workplace culture and maintain that environment, you need to ensure you’re hiring the right people.
HighMatch helps you make the right hiring decisions by providing you with automated hiring assessments that expedite your hiring process while offering you data-driven insights about candidates’ hard and soft skills, personalities, problem-solving abilities, and team fit. Backed by our Industrial-Organizational psychologists, our retail assessment solution has been helping transform retailers’ hiring operations for 15 years. Because we believe in collaboration, your hiring team gets to set the parameters and language for every assessment, ensuring your needs are at the forefront to find the best candidates for you.
With HighMatch, you have access to a suite of tools that streamline your hiring process and let you quickly identify the best candidates for your positions. The faster you can connect with good candidates, the more you reduce the risk of them accepting offers elsewhere. We prepare you to modernize and automate your hiring to target only the top quality candidates that will help you build a long-lasting and reliable retail team.
