Retaining Personnel
What you’ll learn to do: Explain how retailers keep the best personnel
Once you hire great employees, then it is important to keep them! We live in a time of low unemployment, and unhappy employees have the opportunity to seek employment elsewhere. How do the best companies keep their employees?
LEARNING OUTCOMES
- Describe how to evaluate retail employees and provide feedback
- List some reward and compensation plans for great employees
- Identify qualities of strong management leaders
Employees Evaluations and Feedback
Your new retail store has hired the perfect group of employees to run an effective operation. Now it has been a few months and you are looking for ways to evaluate your employees. Monster.com offers some insight into effectively evaluating the retail employee.
As managers, your days can be filled from morning to night. Evaluating employees is a seemingly easy task to put off until later. Unfortunately, if we don’t take the time to review employee performance, they may leave for an employer who does. It isn’t a task that most managers enjoy, so what are some things we can do to make it a more palatable task?
First, don’t think about it as a critical event. If it is scheduled as a routine process, say every three to six months, it can be viewed more as a way to evaluate performance and make improvements, rather than a critical process. Start with a bottom up approach, asking the employee how they feel their job is going and how you may offer help to them in reaching their goals. Start with the positive! Everyone is doing something well.
Properly implemented performance reviews, evaluations and the resulting feedback can provide productive feedback to help employees improve their performance. Suggesting needed changes in performance is part of the process, and when offered in a positive environment can foster the needed improvement. Suggesting changes and coaching employees to improvement is an effective way to provide feedback. How might this look in a real world example?
EXAMPLE
Manager: John, thank you for coming in today so we can talk about how the job is going. First, are there any areas where we could be of help for you to complete your tasks?
John: Thanks for asking. Yes, the mops I use on the retail floor are getting a little worn. I think I could be faster on the task with new ones.
Manager: Awesome John. Thank you for the information. I will take a look and see how we can fix that for you. That was one of the issues I wanted to chat with you about today, was speed. We will look at the mop issue, and then let’s put together a plan to increase how many floors you can get done in your shift. Do you see other ways you may be able to speed up the task so we can get all of the work done?
John: Yes, I think if I can put together a schedule of which floors to do which day, so they aren’t so dirty when I get to them, it will help.
Manager: Great. Let’s work on that schedule together, I will look at the mop situation and we can discuss again in a few weeks.
John: Awesome thank you!
Do you see how that conversation started on a positive note, let to the employee answering his own questions and working toward the common goal? It would have been a completely different conversation and tone, had the manager come in with “John, you are too slow, and you need to get 20% more work done on your shifts than you currently are. What are you going to do about that?” We ended with the exact same outcome, improving performance, but in a positive way.
Of course this isn’t always possible, but if we begin by looking at the effort put in, the abilities of the employee and the clarity of how tasks are defined, we can determine job performance. If you have an employee, who after many positive reviews and coaching from managers or supervisors, is still not working up to potential, it is necessary to look at other evaluation and feedback options.
Graphic rating scales and checklists can be used, which rate an employee on a scale for things like output, job knowledge and attitude. These may be less effective, as they immediately put an employee on the defensive for a poor rating. They may however be needed in certain situations where a more positive approach is not working well or you are receiving complaints from other employees.
So do evaluations often, begin with asking the employee how they feel they are doing and how the company or manager may help them complete their job more efficiently. Offer positive feedback and guidance along with a coaching mentality to help employees improve performance.