Organized retail is not as such known to be a stable profession in terms of longevity or work hours. This has been magnified due to the competition from online retail which generally tends to have an advantage in traditional retail concepts such as pricing, assortment and convenience. The one way that bricks-and-mortar retailers could have gained an edge would have been service, but unfortunately talent management has never been given due importance in this field. Instead, retailers tend to understaff to save costs, and the scheduling keeps changing on almost daily basis. Operations research conducted though has clearly established that increasing staff strength during peak working hours, will actually lead to greater sales and business turnover. Such a study was anchored at Gap, lead by a team of experts from universities of Chicago and North Carolina. The results astonished the management, so two key changes were incorporated. “On-calls” which is sudden changes to schedule were eliminated for a start. The other was that employee schedules were posted two weeks in advance. Unstable schedules might appear cost-effective initially, but this faulty implementation of lean management principles lead to hidden costs. The deep reservoir of data warehousing available to researchers from over three decades of study, has clearly revealed that costs actually rise. This also arises due to a cognitive bias and agencies mishandling schedules. This entire fallacy has to be weeded out from the head-office, which is where most of this instability emanates from.

Source:https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-when-retail-workers-have-stable-schedules-sales-and-productivity-go-up?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=dailyalert&referral=00563&deliveryName=DM3627

Uploaded Date:07 June 2018