People power

What really separates retail winners from the herd

From a hiring and retention point of view, the macroeconomy is a bit of a perfect storm right now. A well documented collapse in graduate recruitment means thousands of applicants chasing fewer and fewer roles, and the Government’s apparent strategy of making it more expensive and riskier to hire anyone is having a similar effect across non-graduate roles too.

Now if you are very short sighted, one response to that as an employer is to rub your hands with glee at the way the market has become a hirer’s one rather than a candidate’s one.

And it turns out there are plenty of such short-sighted employers out there. Just ask anyone going through that graduate recruitment mill - 6 layers of automated video based ‘tasks’ over 2 months before getting a cursory rejection note without ever meeting a human being along the way. An almighty contest between AI recruitment and assessment tools and AI tools designed to apply for as many roles as possible is underway, leaving the bewildered candidate out in the cold.

Now it may be that there are some employment sectors where that works out just fine - where recruitment is a numbers game and new starters are just cannon fodder to be processed through ‘the machine’.

But if you work in the retail or hospitality sectors, or frankly any business where building connections and having conversations with customers is important, then you’d be a fool to think that is the right response to the current job market.

Over the years, I’ve seen many businesses succeed and fail for lots of different reasons, but if there is one thing that tends to unite the winners it is that they have succeeded in becoming places in which their colleagues actually want to work. Businesses that invest in recruiting properly, that spend time and energy on internal communications, which train and incentivise their colleagues and which put the ability to solve customer problems at the heart of what job success looks like win in the end.

The purest example of that is one I’ve written about before here on Moving Tribes. It is an observable and repeatable fact that the single most powerful indicator of NPS scores or any other measure of whether a customer has had a good time in your store or restaurant is whether or not someone said “Hello” when they first walked in.

That isn’t, of course, because there is something magic about that word. It is because a cheery greeting is usually a sign that everything in the store model is working - colleagues want to be there, are confident they can deal with anything the customer brings up and know that being open for discussion and questions is the fastest way to make a sale.

Getting that magic mix right, however, is difficult. Getting to the point where central teams feel connected to customers’ experiences in store, where store managers feel supported and understood by the centre, and where store teams are tight-knit and have each others’ backs is the result of masses of hard work.

Here, though, are some things I find to be common indicators businesses are getting their people game right (“maximising their human capital”, if you want to sound like a dystopian sci-fi novel):

• They have clearly articulated values, and stick to them. (The test of which is that colleagues in far-flung stores are confident that when they make a decision based on those values, the business will back them).

• They hire carefully, recognising that ‘hire for will, train for skill’ is the winning formula and focussing when they bring someone on board on whether they will get on with their colleagues

• They communicate, a lot. Business results updates, discussion of new projects, celebrations of successes and recognition of colleagues are all normal, not exceptional

• They invest in training and development (if you are business that lives or dies on colleagues selling to customers, why is training the first budget to cut, rather than the Boardroom lunch bill?)

• They keep the customer front and centre, making sure their values and the way they bring them to life for colleagues means doing the right thing for the customer every time.

• They understand that every employee matters - whether in a store, delivering to a customers home or making the machine work in head office or a warehouse.

How does your business do against that scorecard? Indeed, do you think I’ve missed anything - comments are open below if so.

The very fact that so few businesses get all of this right is testimony to the fact that it is difficult. It means investing when the temptation is to cut and save. It means making decisions that are short-term costly in return for longer term results.

But the best businesses will recognise that the current difficult job market is not an excuse to avoid these calls, but a huge opportunity to double down on them. There is a massive talent pool out there to be tapped, and if you can create the right opportunities you can make your business a target and a home for the best people out there.

As an example, it might aggravate you, as it does me, that the current Government has persisted with the same broken Apprenticeship Levy model that the last one introduced, but don’t let Whitehall myopia stop you - find creative ways to use the levy (or indeed, create your own Apprenticeships) and you’ll find a ready pool of people both in your current workforce and outside who want to learn, develop and grow with you.

Any observation of the winners and losers on the High Street makes clear that investing in becoming an employer of choice is the best decision any consumer brand can make.