In the retail industry, high turnover and low-profit margins create fierce competition and significant challenges as an employer.
On top of the administrative tasks that keep your organization running smoothly behind the scenes, you’re competing against a growing number of businesses and the gig economy for workers, not to mention juggling schedules and managing the challenges of seasonality. While you’re striving to build a collaborative culture and develop employees with limited budgets and time constraints, you’re also navigating compliance and labor laws.
There never seems to be enough time in the day to manage it all, especially if the team uses an outdated HR and payroll platform or still manages processes manually. Historically, you had to adapt to what was available in existing HR and payroll platforms, but with today’s modern technology, you have far more options. Now, you can find complete solutions that fit you and your team’s unique needs and objectives — not the other way around.
To truly meet and exceed your goals, you need access to the right tools and employee data that bring value now and will continue to do so well into the future. But you also need to be prepared for the challenges ahead and understand how the right HR and payroll technology and service partner will help you overcome them.
Challenge 1: Time-Consuming Manual Tasks
Trends, seasonality, and even the day of the week impact how many customers your team serves. Schedule changes, shift swapping, and short-notice workforce fluctuations can throw a wrench into your payroll processes, even for the most experienced professionals.
Instead of manual and error-prone data reentry that can impact your tax compliance, level up your payroll processes with employee self-service, custom reporting, and other features that help your business improve payroll accuracy, make compliance a breeze, and gain insights to power decision-making.
Challenge 2: Disconnected Business Systems
The IRS estimates that 33% of companies make errors that result in billions of dollars in fines annually across the industry. And in the retail industry where you have ever-changing staffing needs, maintaining accuracy is even more challenging.
Automation can streamline processes, including scheduling, attendance, shift change requests, and workforce analytics. Using a single system helps maximize efficiency and forecast labor demand.
Challenge 3: Competitive Labor Market
Although the “quit rate” in retail is 70% higher than in other sectors, research shows investing in employees in other ways will help keep top talent. From recruitment to retention, technology can enhance your processes and make your organization more attractive to employees, both current and future.
Challenge 4: High Employee Turnover
For today’s employees, work is no longer just a punch-in and-out commitment. They see their job as an extension of themself and seek employment with organizations with a strong company culture.
Modern HR and payroll solutions with integrated, mobile-friendly collaboration tools centralize accurate and timely company info while giving employees the connection they want making them more engaged, aware, and productive.
Challenge 5: Lack of Company-Wide Communication
In the retail and wholesale industry, keeping everyone on the same page is complicated — employees work different shifts and often at different locations. Many of them don’t have access to computers or company email addresses, and they’re on the floor during every shift.
To address this, businesses in the retail space can leverage employee-centric, mobile-enabled HR software to fully engage their employees, no matter when and where they work.