Retail businesses succeed or fail on effective staff scheduling–a task more challenging than ever during the pandemic. FMS Solutions, accounting and payroll specialists with an exclusive focus on independent businesses, counsels its clients on shift scheduling strategies that reduce managers’ stress, errors and time commitment, and translates to better productivity and higher sales.
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FMS Solutions’ recommendations include:
- Know your staff: Identify your staff’s strengths, how well they work with others, as well as their weaknesses. Create teams around the best-performing employees and empower them to take more responsibility; this ensures every shift is well balanced and staff is set up to succeed.
- Communicate: Communication is essential for any company, but especially in the retail industry. It can mean the difference between having enough employees to cover a shift and being short-staffed. Lack of communication often leads to double booking, missed shifts, and increased stress.
- Be Flexible: The entire system, not to mention peoples’ lives, has been upended by the pandemic; be flexible and understanding, and observe work preferences and time-off requests; employees do a much better job when they are happy.
- Encourage Employees to Find Their Replacements: Putting employees in charge of finding their own substitute to cover their working hours promotes self-responsibility, employee collaboration, and can help reduce your workload.
- Have a Backup for Your Backup: Ensure that you always have enough employees in your stores. The recent pandemic has taught us that having a Plan B is not enough. Always have a list of available employees willing to cover shifts on short notice; holidays and special events can cause an unusual spike in customers, so be prepared.
The Stable Scheduling Study, a research study conducted by an interdisciplinary team from the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, found that stable scheduling sharply increased median sales by 7%, and increased productivity by 5%.
FMS Solutions supports over 5,000 independent business locations and 400 family-owned companies across the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and South America. Together, their retailers bring together nearly 25% of the independent retail sales in the U.S.