In my last blog, I discussed motivating employees and why this is important now that stores have reopened.
As a retail manager, along with motivation, you need to focus on increasing engagement; because this dramatically impacts employee performance and retention. While motivation refers to ‘behaviours chosen’, engagement is intrinsic, creating an internal ‘feeling’ of caring as much about success as you do.
Here is a 6-part blueprint you can follow to improve employee engagement at your stores. Prove to yourself it works by comparing how your best team members ‘score’ on this blueprint versus your lower performers.
Blueprint for Employee Engagement
1. Job Importance
Employees have to believe the job they are doing is important, or they won’t try hard. Make sure all your employees know how important they are.
2. Clarity of Expectations
Do your employees know what success and failure look like? You need to be really clear with them about what the expectations are to get them to paddle in the right direction.
3. Job Improvement
Communicate clearly to your staff how doing something will make their job better.
4. Regular Feedback
If you don’t provide regular feedback, you are going to lose your employees. People need ongoing feedback to help them improve.
5. Quality of Relationships
As the store manager, you are responsible for all the relationships in your store, and it’s up to you to help people find common ground to work productively together. If you have a broken relationship with someone on your schedule, you need to fix it and fix it fast. Remember, you can’t coach someone if you have a broken relationship. Fix the relationships in your store, and you will fix the majority of compliance issues. This will also go a long way in building engagement.
6. Culture and Values
If you’ve done a good job hiring with values-based interviewing, this won’t be a problem. You can have a checklist that can help you assess how an employee fits into the culture and values of your company.
Do you know our Get Managing online retail management program can increase the competency level of managers by 25%? If you want to learn more about this amazing program or book a free demo, get in touch with me today!
At Graff Retail, we create leading-edge retail training programs specifically designed and customized to increase staff knowledge and performance with innovative teaching methods to drive sales and revenue for businesses.
