How to Improve Performance Management of Your Retail Store Employees

Performance Management in the retail business has become an inevitable aspect. Employees in the store need to perform very well to make sure that they are aware of the products, processes and provide excellent customer service.

All of these are linked with how well the store employee performs and this is then linked to how well is the performance management planned, conveyed and implemented in the stores.

While a lot has been written when it comes to the corporate level performance management, very little has been written with regards to the performance management of the retail frontline employees, in terms of “how to structure” a performance management plan for the retail frontline employees.

With my experience of building a performance management system for the retail frontline employees and being able to licence it to customers in the apparel, home furnishing, QSR industry, I have tried to pin down my learnings below:

a) Time It: To begin with, define a time duration in which the employee will be eligible to move to the next role. This helps frontline employees to plan their career better and this will be an important factor to help frontline employees decide if they want to stay back in the company for a longer period of time.

b) Checklists: Frontline employees working in any kind of job role in the stores are involved in managing multiple tasks as a part of their KRAs. These tasks can be converted into checklists they need to complete in a certain time period. If in a particular job role, you have multiple departments or stations, you can assign checklists of each station for a particular time and upon successful completion of the checklist (post approval by the manager), the frontline employee can move to the next station.

c) Trainings and eLearnings: Assign various kinds of trainings and elearnings to the store employee as a part of their career growth journey. This will help team members to learn the knowledge part of a particular topic.

d) Manager Evaluation: In this section the manager can provide feedback to the employee on their strengths and weakness. This evaluation can be best when it’s quantifiable. Such as rating various kinds of key performance indicators. This can help get a managerial perspective.

e) Coaching: Coaching has to be a continuous element. It’s a space where a manager can be a coach to a group of people and provide them real time feedback, help them perform well, assign tasks and assignment and finally evaluate on how well they did.

If the above points are mixed together, put in a liner framework, add timelines to it, add approvers of the checklists, make it digital, the outcome will be a highly effective career progression plan.

Having a clear career progression plan for your frontline employees is just so important. It helps them to stay longer in the organization. It helps the HR team to release the top performers, the average performers and the low performers.

With Frontlyne, HR teams can now digitise and create custom career progression plans for their frontline employees within minutes. Frontlyne has been a successful tool to help various HR team to make data driven decision, digitise the process, move away from paper-pencil model, remove bias and bring high level of transparency.