Workforce Alignment

By Christina Zarrello
As retailers around the world are cutting budgets and headcount in an effort to remain viable, businesses must keep employees engaged and stimulate workforce productivity. Retailers can stimulate their workforce through proactive leadership, enhancing communication, investing in workforce management systems and focusing on talent management. The Workforce Institute at Kronos outlines critical steps for retailers to take in order to boost workforce productivity.

Leadership is Critical
Retailers must get extremely focused on setting realistic goals and aligning employees around key business goals. It is critical that everyone in the organization spend time on the tasks that matter the most for the company's survival.

Employees will be looking to their managers to share the pain of wage freezes, reductions of perks and increased workloads driven by headcount reductions.

Additionally, the lines of communication must be kept open and business leaders must speak with their associates about what's happening in the market and what the organization is doing to respond. This is a critical step in keeping employees engaged and productive. In the absence of information, employees will assume the worst case scenario.

WM Systems in Action
When Loblaw added Workforce Management from RedPrairie in January 2009, the retailer increased its productivity and visibility into workforce operations, time and attendance, business forecasting and workforce demand planning. The Canadian chain also uses the system to automate optimized scheduling, and set up dashboards with configurable alerts and computer-based training. Today, the system manages more than 120,000 associates.

Engaging Employees
The employees closest to the work can have great impact on improving revenue and margin opportunities. Being assigned to a strategic project often is viewed as a reward or recognition for above-average performance. When these projects dry up, it can negatively impact top performers. Creating strategic initiatives focused on operating improvements provides learning and recognition opportunities for top performers while driving needed organizational efficiencies.

Retailers must use the recession as a chance to take on new challenges and build their employees' skills and experience. Leading retailers are using the current slowdown as a time to boost employee training and encourage employees to seek outside development. This is an immediate skill building benefit for employees, that also can enable the organization to redeploy or advance employees as opportunities arise.

Invest in internship programs to build up the talent pipeline, while providing college students with important resume building opportunities. If the opportunity to learn is good, students will consider unpaid internships.