\r\n \r\nElsewhere in the retail space, Dick’s Sporting Goods has built out its flexibility offering in salary and benefits in addition to scheduling. Associates who sign up for the flexible payment app are able to view and take transfers from their available balance before the usual payday schedule rolls out. “We wanted to offer a unique benefit for our teammates to allow for financial flexibility,” Penelope Sur, Dicks’ vice president of talent management, explained to RIS, adding that the teammates utilizing the technology seem to value the flexibility that it affords them in meeting their personal financial needs and goals.
#3: Do Away With Repetitive Tasks and Let the Tech Do the Talking
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Repetitive, manual tasks can make it feel like Groundhog Day for frontline retail workers. Automating away these duties can free associates up for more value-added and engaging tasks, ultimately reducing turnover and boosting productivity.
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Membership warehouse Sam’s Club recently made moves to improve inventory visibility by rolling out AI-powered “Inventory Scan” towers to its 600-strong fleet of robotic scrubbers. The initiative aims to cut manual tasks for staff and create a better member experience for shoppers.
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To err is human, but by offloading these processes to robot colleagues, the retailer says it can also smooth out any potential inaccuracies in measuring product availability, member experience, or product ordering. The use of these AI-driven, cloud-connected towers also allows Sam’s to autonomously gather valuable information about product localization, planogram compliance, product stock levels, inventory levels, and pricing accuracy. By rolling out these cutting-edge technologies, Sam’s has the potential to create a win-win system for employees — who gain time and consumer insights — and members alike.
#4 Fill Skills Gaps and Unleash Talent Agility With Opportunity Marketplaces
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It’s no secret that labor shortages are a huge problem for retailers. One way around this? Establish a strong internal architecture that allows for greater mobility — also known as internal talent marketplaces. Providing greater insight into who is looking for specific opportunities within your company, internal talent marketplaces offer current employees job search tools, career development resources, and personalized job recommendations based on their skills and areas of interest.
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These spaces can also offer training programs and mentoring opportunities to help employees acquire the skills they need to advance in their careers. Close to a quarter (22%) of retailers plan to invest in learning and development technologies this year, according to RIS’ “33rd Annual Retail Technology Study.” Walmart’s Live Better U program is a prime example of this strategy in action, demonstrating how learning opportunities and career mobility walk in lockstep when it comes to driving greater employee satisfaction, and that these opportunities can be underpinned and facilitated by a robust workforce tech stack. \r\n \r\nIn a recent blog post, Walmart’s senior vice president of learning and leadership, Lorraine Stomski, highlighted the story of Jerryn Robinson, who started out as an hourly associate at Walmart more than a decade ago and now — through Walmart-funded education pathways and access to internal career opportunities on the OneWalmart jobs portal — has now been moved into a salaried position at the Home Office in Arkansas.
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Technology can also reduce bias and democratize the job search process while connecting skilled individuals to hard-to-fill open roles. For example, in October 2022, The Home Depot launched a job seeker marketplace to connect skilled tradespeople with trade jobs. The portal also allows users to upload their resumes and add “badges” for niche skills or qualifications.
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As Schrage explains, the prospect of opportunity is a key driver of engagement: “Opportunity markets are about intentionally and thoughtfully investing in internal ‘marketplaces’ of opportunities for skills acquisitions, project exposure, learning, meeting new people, acquiring new experiences, etc. that can measurably contribute to people’s sense of self in constructive ways,” he explains. “Our research suggests that you don’t just make people aware of opportunities, you offer choices, you inform and invite people to shop for the opportunities that will appeal to them and be good for the enterprise. This is now as much art as science but the data and technologies are there to make it more of both.”
Regardless of how these technologies are deployed, retailers must remember that success depends on the enthusiasm of associates to take these tools and weave them into their day-to-day lives.
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At its heart, retail is a people-centric industry. An effective workforce management tech strategy should reflect this fact. From regular pulse surveys to scheduling apps to intelligent automation, by leveraging technology in an empathetic way, retailers will continue to transform the workforce for the better and create more space for associates to thrive in the age of digital transformation.
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Technologies such as this can also enable more equitable and fair organizations: By streamlining communication channels and reducing siloes, traditional hierarchies can be flattened out, creating more of a fluent ecosystem of information across the organization and opening up opportunities for groups that might traditionally have missed out or been overlooked. For retailers who are open to transforming and enhancing employee experience through technology, the possibilities are truly endless.
Workforce technologies are currently used across broad segments of the employee experience: providing better work-life balance through flexible scheduling; pulse survey tools to gather and listen to regular employee feedback; ensuring equitable salaries, rewards, recognition, and benefits through intelligent automation; and facilitating career agility through internal talent marketplaces, job platforms, and more.
However, decisions on where and how to make these investments should always be driven by what makes the most sense for the workers themselves. As Michael Schrage, research fellow, at the MIT Sloan School’s Initiative on the Digital Economy shares, “[t]he best and most persuasive way for leaders to lead is to ‘lead by example’ — leaders at every level of the hierarchy and chain of command must show how they use data and analytics to inform and influence their decisions and explain why. They need to make it clear that ‘analytic’ and ‘advisory’ resources provided to frontline workers are designed to make their lives and the lives of customers/shoppers easier, simpler, and better.”
Read on to learn how retailers such as The Home Depot, Schnucks, and Walmart are upping their workforce management game and maximizing frontline associate engagement with these cutting-edge tech resources.