Empowering employees
As ever, and in particular through these difficult times, employees remain the heart and soul of retail businesses. Enabling and motivating them to play a proactive part in creating the new normal is key to survival and growth.
While core corporate behaviours like honesty, empathy and clarity remain crucial to engaging your people, their everyday working experience can also be transformed by effective digital workplace technology. Technology that enables them to deliver great service to customers, despite the current challenges.
It is essential that your employees can spend time with customers, explaining new processes and establishing the human connections
Boosting productivity
How can you enable your in-store employees to spend more of their time helping customers find the products and services they want? How can you reduce the time they spend on fixing mundane system problems, like password resets, reboots and equipment failures? In particular in these unusual times, it is essential that your employees can spend time with customers, explaining new processes and establishing the human connections that can make all the difference to the in-store experience.
Modern digital workplace solutions can boost employee productivity in many ways. For example, by using automated and augmented reality solutions to resolve system problems, so your employees can spend more time with customers and less time raising IT support calls. And by giving employees real time access to accurate product and stock information, to help customers make the most informed buying decisions. Digital innovation has become key to enabling employees fulfil their individual potential.
This sense of being part of something larger is becoming increasingly influential for the recruitment and retention of employees
Driving motivation and purpose
Spending more time with customers is clearly good for employee motivation and productivity, as well as benefitting the customers themselves. Motivated employees are more likely to stay, more likely to progress and more likely to support your business growth. By enabling them to deliver great customer service, effective digital technology can boost employee satisfaction and motivation, making the workplace a more exciting and fulfilling place to be. Innovative new store concepts, such as those now starting to emerge as retailers move into recovery mode, are good for employees and customers alike.
Especially in light of the uncertainty caused by COVID-19, it is also important for employees to share your organisation’s sense of purpose, to feel part of something larger than a transactional business operation. Retailers need to articulate a clear ‘north star’ purpose, reflecting how they see their value and role in society at large. This sense of being part of something larger is becoming increasingly influential for the recruitment and retention of employees, in particular as the millennial generation progresses through their careers. Again, digital technology can help create more sustainable, efficient businesses, helping to underpin a more attractive, responsible sense of corporate and individual purpose.
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