HR planning in retail
This is the current staffing situation in the retail sector: many employees have left the textile sector and bakeries for companies in sectors that were not affected by pandemic-related closures, such as food retailers.
This means that many textile retailers and bakeries are now faced with the challenge of establishing an overview of how well their current staffing levels match their actual staffing needs, whilst also considering their current turnover planning.
Challenges for the HR department
Consequently, current challenges for the HR department are to
1. establish an overview of the current and future staffing situation (surplus and shortage) over the course of the year, and
2. determine the planning flexibility they have with the existing staff.
The new staff shortage analysis from SEAK
With SEAK’s new Staff Shortage Analysis (SSA), retailers can identify staff shortages as well as scope for manoeuvre. They receive support for requirements-based holiday planning and for cross-divisional rotations to compensate for surpluses or shortages.
The Staff Shortage Analysis supports retailers in identifying staff shortages and scope for action from a bird’s eye view interactively for the entire company and all its divisions.
The company divisions can be individual departments, branches, houses and areas.
Causes for staff shortages can be: too few employees, staff distribution ( both throughout the year and between branches/areas), staff structure ( the distribution of full-time, part-time, temporary staff) and unsuitable holiday planning.
Experience shows that optimising holiday planning often holds immense potential for solving staff shortages.
This potential lies in the consistent alignment of holiday planning in accordance with demand and thus often also with the seasonal cycle of the year.
For managers to be able to communicate the need for demand-based holiday planning, the Staff Shortage Analysis provides them with transparency regarding surpluses and shortages by month and area.
This allows them to see how many holidays could or should still be planned and also what proportion of a projected staff shortage is attributable to an excess of planned holidays at a specific time.
With the Staff Shortage Analysis, it is also easy to see the extent to which staff could be deployed across departments to compensate for surpluses or shortages.