Improving Employee Engagement in Retail: It's Easier than You Think

By John Orr,  senior vice president of retail strategy and execution, Ceridian HCM

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This is the first in a series of four articles that will focus on the changing buying experience in retail and its impacts on floor associates’ relationship with customers. Employee engagement can affect the relationship profoundly, and large gains can be found in the basics of retailers’ technology for human capital management.

Ask a retailer whether or not its customers are important, and the answer will be yes every time. That attitude, however, doesn’t always translate to the way a retailer thinks of and treats its internal customers – the floor associates. Sure, some retailers get it right. But for every retailer that treats its hourly staff well, there’s another that doesn’t. That’s a shame, because the relationship between a retailer’s customers and floor staff is dynamic; the two stakeholders are inextricable and affect a retailer’s bottom line together, as one. Plus, the new path to purchase—which includes consumers’ self-directed online research and their now-asymmetrical decision-making process—strengthens, and does not weaken, the relationship binding floor associates with customers. The upside is this: Any retailer that improves its floor associates’ working conditions will by corollary improve customers’ experience. That means more sales, more than justifying the cost to invest in the surprisingly straightforward upgrades to infrastructure that improve employee engagement and satisfaction. Retailers can see noticeable results by shifting from overly integrated to unified technology for core elements of their human capital management (HCM).

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