As a Retail business, can you afford to just implement an LMS?

Let’s define the obvious - Learning Management System is a software which helps businesses to upload learning material, conduct assessment, and store records of learning – That’s it. In the retail business, having just an LMS would cost the retail business dearly. Most of the businesses I speak to, spend an enormous amount of time conducting learnings and training on an LMS, and the most important part, “Career Progression Planning” is printed out and filled in.

Career Progression, simply put is a strategically designed career path for a frontline team member to move up the ladder. Career Progression consists of 3 important aspects:

a) Mastering on the job skills,

b) Learning and Training,

c) Approval of the skills by the supervisors.

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When these 3 aspects are put together in a model which suits your business, you have a career progression. The most interesting part is that all the retail companies have career progression plans but only a few of them carry this out in an effective manner.

Almost every retail business I speak to, have an offline career progression for the retail frontline teams. And this then brings in varied data on numerous excel sheets. The top 3 challenges I hear from most of the HR and L&D leaders of the retail companies are: a) Way too much data to manage, b) The career progression plan may not be carried out as rigorously c) Bias finds its way into the career progression.

Another very common thought I hear from many retail businesses is that we have an LMS. And we try to explain that LMS is only helping you in Learning and Training, the major part is still offline.

The suggested way out is to have ONE SINGLE PLATFORM and AUTOMATE end to end!

Here are our top 3 learnings while helping retail businesses plan and go digital with their Career Progression Planning for the frontline teams:

1)   Look out for a “single platform” in which data can talking to each other:

There is an HRMS, LMS, Virtual Calling Tool, Rewards and Recognition Tool, and another 2 to 3 more applications. These are way too many applications for anyone to handle. Imagine as a frontline team member, being busy in the store all day long, and then all these applications for various tasks. Can we bring all these tools together in one application? I say this because having one single application to all these activities makes life easier for our frontline team members, and a higher chance of cross usage of other elements may happen too (of course, HRMS has to be kept out of this solution as that solution is a very evolved one with multiple features in itself).

2)   Make career progression a continuous discussion:

Career Progression is as important to the frontline teams as it is for any other corporate employee. It is a proven fact that a larger number of employees are highly engaged and retained for a longer term by showing the clear path to move up the ladder and setting up the right expectation to succeed. In our journey of planning and consulting on career progressions for the retail frontline teams, we have worked with multiple retail businesses to help them go digital on their journey, and most of them have created a fantastic career progression plan which is a continuous one. Continuous learning, skill observation, and ongoing feedback can prove to be a very strong tool to build a stronger workforce that is aware of the business process, product and customers, than having a career progression that is held quarterly or on a monthly basis. By designing career progression in a continuous mode, it helps HR and L&D teams to get more real-time data, resolve issues immediately than waiting for the next cycle of career progression discussion. The last thing you want to do in a retail business is to resolve a customer service issue or a skill issue or a product knowledge issue at a later date. Data that comes out of career progression can help the HR and L&D teams immensely to figure out the frontline teams who are performing well and those who are heading towards being low performers, which such data in hand, HR and L&D teams can make learning interventions quickly and help the frontline team members to catch up faster and perform better.

3)   Focus more on insights and less on data:

Digitalization is really pushing limits to the greater heights by helping training teams to modify processes with the help of data. Let’s take an example of managing accounts – those were the days when accountants wrote transaction details in a book and let’s name it “analog”, they then moved to software, let’s name it “digital”, the next step is the most exciting one – how can we create intelligent software which can help the accountant make smarter choices and decisions by looking at the trends. This is exactly what needs to happen on the subject we are speaking about: How can we not just digitize Career Progression, but draw intelligent trends to make decisions for the business to make the right choices and bring about a larger and impactful change?

With Frontlyne, our vision has been to do exactly this – To build a single platform for learning, training, career progression, sales and rewards management, and standard operating processes management. And use data to draw insights for the HR and Training teams. We would love to share more on our work, do drop in a line at ronald@mgenlearn.com and I would be happy to share the success we were able to achieve for our retail customers.