Modern Workforce Management: Delivering Productivity and Customer Satisfaction

A perfect storm of rising wages, tight labor market, and competition from the gig economy has triggered a tectonic shift in retail. To cope with these disruptions, retailers are implementing programs and technologies that focus on keeping employees safe, respected and engaged. Other key goals include improving retention, productivity, morale and, most importantly, customer satisfaction.

“Almost every retailer I’ve spoken to in the past month has a load of vacancies and is simply unable to fill them,” says Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData. “They are offering perks, better pay and bonuses to remedy this.”

They are also investing heavily in workforce management tools, according to the RIS“2021 Retail Technology Study.” All nine workforce technologies tracked in the report have strong implementation plans over the next 24 months.

Compared to pre-pandemic data from the 2019 Retail Technology Study, eight of nine workforce technologies are up by double digits over pre-pandemic levels. The top three technologies are up more than 20 percentage points — recruitment and onboarding (up 24%), mobile workforce and/or HR apps (up 26%), and time and attendance (up 27%).

Read on to discover how to get the most out of these investments and the modern retail workforce.