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 trust of our employees has grown noticeably. They feel taken seriously because they can easily bring in their own wishes as well as manage and settle some concerns themselves.“
“It now only takes 30 to 60 minutes instead of two to three hours to plan an entire month’s staff schedules.
What is particularly important is that the quality of service has increased. Because we use more staff hours at busy times compared to before.”
“The quality of our staff scheduling has improved significantly since we introduced SEAK’s staff scheduling software a year ago!
Even before SEAK, staff scheduling was successful in some stores, but now we are reaching a reliably high level at every location. “
” Our consultations have improved noticeably because the planners have a much clearer, more realistic guideline than before. Especially in our fashion departments, I can’t imagine any other solution anymore.”
“Thanks to the SEAK system, we were able to reduce overtime by 80 per cent – and that already in the first year and with an unchanged number of employees”
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“One thing is certain: our staff presence and thus our customer service have improved. We also know this from the feedback and evaluations of our customers from our internal Qualitize system.
“We have transferred employees to other branches or accommodated requests for reduced working hours. So there was a compensation.
This resulted in increased sales, lower costs and improved work procedures.”
“We knew that other companies in our industry that we knew also used the software and so we asked our colleagues about it.
From their positive response, it was clear to us at this point that we would decide in favor of SEAK’s Staff Scheduling. “
“SEAK software enables smarter, faster and more efficient processes and operations. None of the branch managers use paper and pencil for scheduling any more, only the SEAK system.”
“SEAK software is unrivalled for companies in our field and has become indispensable for our company.”
“We can now better avoid overstaffing and deploy even more employees than before during peak periods.
So effectively we offer even more and better service and generate more sales. I did not think that this outcome could be achieved so quickly. “
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.