5 Innovative Strategies Retailers Can Implement to Boost Employee Engagement and Minimize Turnover

Boosting employee engagement can help to minimize turnover and there are many steps that retailers can take. Employee engagement is essential for retailers to retail industry is often associated with low compensation and poor work-life balance, causing employees to leave. 

Besides, there is a direct correlation between your employee turnover rate and the overall success of your business, according to a study by The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The study also goes on to say that successful businesses often have lower turnover rates and higher customer satisfaction rates. Profitable businesses could achieve that by investing in employee well-being and engagement. 

By making considerable changes in your operations to accommodate employee engagement programs and activities, you can improve your overall business performance. This is especially true in the retail industry, where the employee turnover rate is generally higher than in other industries. 

In this blog, we will discuss how to design innovative strategies in the retail industry to boost employee retention numbers and engagement activities. 

What is Retail Employee Engagement?

Retail employee engagement refers to the enthusiasm and emotional investment of the employees in their company and their work. It means how much they are engaged in their daily tasks. It also measures your employees’ sense of belongingness in your work culture and their willingness to put their best efforts into the assigned tasks and find innovative solutions to common operational challenges. 

It is important to understand that the higher the engagement rate, the higher the employee satisfaction rate, quality of work and service, and, ultimately, the customer retention rate. It also leads to increased productivity and growth in your sales and revenue. Furthermore, at a more back-end level, an engaged employee strives to foster team collaboration and create a positive workspace. 

What are Retail Employee Engagement Programs?

While it’s important to understand that different models encourage different employees, you can design an inclusive engagement culture that includes different features. Let’s discuss some of the common retail employee engagement programs that you can implement in your workplace.

• Flexible Schedule

One of the major reasons for the employee turnover rate in retail is the high burnout rate and low schedule flexibility. Taking your employee’s preferences to create a schedule can lead to optimum work-life balance, resulting in increased productivity and employee satisfaction. 

• Sufficient Job Training

Another engagement program you can try is providing extensive training with bite-sized modules on various topics related to their job function and related skills. This helps address common operational problems and brings new perspectives and techniques to improve their workflow. Many retail companies also create dedicated training portals for their employees. 

• Create Value

Most employees benefit drastically if they have a value motivating them. Make them an active part of the decision-making process by taking their feedback and organizing brainstorming sessions to improve operations. With this strategy, they will feel respected, valued, and heard while also getting the opportunity to voice out their challenges and ways to improve them. You can also organize community services or introduce sustainable goals at the workplace. 

• Feedback System

Understanding your employees’ shortcomings and how to improve them can greatly motivate them. Create a transparent and well-maintained feedback system to increase their work efficiency and achieve achievable goals. Furthermore, endeavor to establish clear communication channels to ensure they can reach out to you for clarifications or queries.

All of these programs can help to enhance the engagement rates with your employees and foster a supportive and interactive workplace environment. Now, let’s discuss some top strategies to boost employee productivity and engagement within the workplace. 

5 Innovative Employee Engagement Strategies for the Retail Sector

You can adopt several innovative solutions if you want to go beyond the basics to increase your employees’ morale. Here are the top 5 creative ways to engage employees. 

Strategy 1: Implement Gamification for Training and Development

Gamification refers to introducing elements of games, such as the introduction of rewards and badges, interactive content like quizzes and team trivia sessions, and using specific platforms in your retail employee engagement strategy. You can create dynamic training programs with a reward system for each module completed or milestone crossed, much like McDonald’s gamification strategy to train new employees and Cisco’s game-based approach to tempt their staff to finish the social media program. 

To implement gamification in your workflow, you can utilize the multi-step approach. 

• Identify your goal and understand your challenges. 
• Choose the right tools and platforms.
• Introduce the system in the workspace. 
• Collect feedback and improve.

Collecting feedback and improving the system will make it easier for you to build a system that is perfectly designed for your organization.  

Strategy 2: Personalized Career Pathways

One of the best ways to retain your talent is to provide them with personalized career pathways within the organization. They feel valued and have achievable goals by helping them chart out their developmental progress in the coming years. It also motivates them personally and professionally, leading to higher employee satisfaction. You can design a personalized career pathway for your employees in a specific way.

• Identify and analyze their skill set and work etiquette.
• Communicate with them to understand their vision and create their roadmap.
• Provide suitable training for skill and knowledge development.  
• Give and receive regular feedback and pivot the roadmap if necessary. 

This innovative method of employee engagement was successfully implemented in Walmart through their Live Better U program and Salesforce through their learning platform and tuition support. 

Strategy 3: Leveraging Technology for Better Communication

Businesses can successfully leverage it to streamline their communications as technology is growing and becoming more versatile. Employees feel more engaged when they have a transparent and easy communication channel to interact within the organization. It also enhances collaborations, provides straightforward information, and offers a space where employees can share their opinions and ideas. 

There are lots of tools available to improve your communication practices besides emails. 

• Slack – One of the most popular tools for team communication and collaboration. 
• Zipline – A retail-oriented platform that promotes easy communication and task management. 
• Staffbase – A multi-support and multi-channel communication platform used by over 200 companies

To effectively implement technology to improve your communication, you can follow the following strategy. 

• Identify the needs and gaps with your structure. 
• Define your goals and choose the right solution.
• Integrate the communication platform within your workflow. 
• Take stakeholder feedback and improve. 

Identification of the needs and gaps is the structure is the most important step to find a perfect solution. It is best to discuss with your employees and connect with them on a 1:1 level to understand their problems and discuss with the stakeholders to come up with the best solution. 

Strategy 4: Wellness and Mental Health Support.

Working in retail can often be demanding and stressful, leading to burnout. Mental exhaustion and stress are often the largest contributors to high employee turnover in the retail industry. However, by providing wellness tools and support, you can engage your employees and help them manage their mental health better. Mental wellness programs will also boost your employee’s morale and decrease absenteeism. 

You can introduce wellness programs and mental health support in your retail company in the following ways.

• Create an overall positive and stress-free workplace with optimum management and planning. Your employees should feel valued and supported within the company. 
• Flexible schedule that keeps employees’ preferences and burnout into account. Their schedules should also allow an ideal work-life balance. You can integrate the latest workforce management (WFM) tools to streamline the scheduling process. 
• Introduce team-wide mental health programs. You can invite guest speakers that can help your employees deal with stress or create resources for their references. Moreover, companies can offer optional or mandatory counseling or therapy sessions for their employees. 
• Include stress-bursting and morale-boosting activities to give your employees a space to enjoy and have fun. Company trivia nights, special dinners, and office parties are some of the activities you can organize. In addition to these, you can also create clubs, like a book club, movie club, gym club, or others, to let your employees connect with their colleagues and build valuable relationships. 

Several retail companies have reaped the benefits of well-developed mental health programs. Unilever has created a safe space where employees can reach out and seek help, but the company has created an app that offers emergency health assistance and health information for employees. 

Strategy 5:  Recognition and Reward Systems

With a proper reward system in place, the staff turnover rate can decrease by 31%, and employee productivity can rise to 17%, according to a study by Deloitte. Retail can be a challenging and thankless job at times; hence, routinely recognizing high performance and improvement can make your employees engaged and satisfied. It lets them know that their work is monitored and their hard work is being rewarded, increasing their loyalty to the company. 

You can use several innovative ways to set up your employee reward system.

• Unique reward

Instead of giving vouchers or cash, consider rewarding them with experiences like a spa session, gym membership, or tickets to a game or movie. You can even take it a step further and give them the option to convert their rewards into paid time offs. To create greater impact, personalize the rewards according to your employees’ preferences. 

• Dedicated platform and day

You can set up a platform where employees can praise each other for jobs well done or for offering help and support. Special appreciation days could even be set up. 

• Offer training support

   You can provide your employees with suitable support if you think that they are thinking of going back to college to upgrade their skills or pursue an education. This could include paying for their tuition or offering time off or flexible work hours. 

You can set up your recognition programs by: 

• Understand your goals, budget, and any challenges. 
• Create dedicated resources and infrastructure for recognition. 
• Choose different categories of rewards. 
• Design a transparent performance tracking and reward system.
• Collect feedback and improve your strategies. 

All these strategies can help to create a better workplace environment. It is recommended to connect on a personal level with employees and learn what steps could be taken to increase engagement to boost the value of your efforts.

Final Words

One of the most important resources of a retail company is its human resources. Including a variety of innovative strategies to keep your employees engaged and happy can have a lasting, positive impact on your organization’s overall growth and success. Implement any of these strategies in your workflow to retain your employees and scale your operations.