CHALLENGES TO EMPLOYEE MANAGEMENT IN RETAIL ORGANIZATIONS

Concerns have been expressed for many years about the Challenges in Retail Organisation, relevant skills that businesses require to compete effectively in global markets. Especially challenges of e-Learning in Retail organisations. Steps have been taken in order to improve the training systems. This includes creation of new training routes for young people. Despite the introduction of a plethora of government interventions over the last 20 years, the same arguments continue to be made. The employee engagement survey still shows not all are satisfactorily trained.

Globally, over half (54 percent) of the retail workforce is based in sales and customer service related occupations. This includes sales and retail assistants, retail cashiers and check-out operators.  Also, sales and customer service occupations of retail organisations are the largest group in retain sector. But sadly these days this group experience a poor retention rate due to several challenges. Consider for eg. UK where 384,200 new sales and customer service staff will be required to replace those leaving the sector. People do come to fill the vacancy. But mostly are having inadequate knowledge about the work they are going to perform. This means that frequent changes in the sales workforce occur in retail , which causes pain for the managers to train every new batch as effectively.

---

The increased use of Technology in Retail stores:

Picking another stream, Retail sector has seen a major advancement in Technology, huge over the past few years in India. The development of various kinds of in-store technology in recent decades has led to new in-store services. These technological innovations include the widespread use of bar codes and point-of-service price scanning, related tools such as interactive kiosks, as well as emerging applications based on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags.

With these technologies, retailers can manage stock in a more efficient and effective manner and, at the same time, allow customers to conduct transactions or obtain product information and service with minimal assistance from store employees. But, this comes with an alarming note of a well-trained in-store staff. Then they need to be trained with the proper usage of these security systems. Realizing that how important these security systems are, we can understand the importance of in-depth training in retail. As a matter of concern, the frequent substitutions of employees make this process a lot more hectic for the managers to handle.

Thus, we now require an automated system in retailing. This facilitates the retailer managers & employees to deal with such a situation. Industries like these now demand a separate chain for dealing with employee training. Such an external chain would not only look after the basic training of employees but also would keep the trainees updated with the technological advancements in the industry.

This whole process could be made much simpler and automated if system could be made online.  Have you ever heard about “TMS”. I am pretty sure that most of you have not. TMS as in “Training Management System” is all about the online training of employees.

It has the following components:

• Scale up the learning efforts for the in-store staff and managers using e-learning.
• Allows the staff to get trained in their local languages.
• Managers can use observation check list on the mobile devices for the on- job assessments.
• Obviously reduces the dependence on the trainer availability.
• Inform about the new product or service to the work- force rapidly

In one line, it a system of training where provision of learning resources and trainee assessments are made online, without the requirement of presence of trainers. About 18% of the total retail organizations in India have now become aware about this new system and are thus able to observe the results out of it.