Retail – Staff Turnover and Knowledge Management

This blog was written by Joe Williams

In this series of blogs, we are looking at what rising costs could mean for the Retail industry in 2023 and sharing some useful tips on where you can begin to look for cost savings.

Staff turnover and knowledge loss prevention are key challenges within the Retail industry. In fact, it has one of the highest staff turnover rates. A whopping 60% are considering leaving their jobs in the next few months and only half are looking to stay within the sector. Although this problem is widespread within the industry, the pain is often most acute when there is in particular a lack of training in place for new employees and few standardised processes. 

So how can we mitigate this problem? – First consider employee satisfaction. Retailers need to offer competitive salaries and working conditions. Most retail workers expect some flexibility in their schedules and the latest technology to support their success. Once you are confident that you have a competitive job offering, it’s a good idea to consider your onboarding process and how you train new members of staff. 

Are you confident that you have a set of processes new employees can follow, or are they taught on the job?

New employee training and ongoing regular staff training are crucial for business success. This is even more pertinent in the Retail sector that has high staff turnover. Maintaining efficiency in business operations is an ongoing battle. Knowledge management tools should be in place to ensure that everything is documented, repeatable and scalable. Not only does this help ensure compliant business operations, but it also helps to create the ‘training manual’ for an organisation. We shouldn’t expect staff to know how to do everything. We should be providing them with an up-to-date source of information/process library that they can refer back to. understand and follow. 

After all, we are all creatures of habit. It is often the case that the knowledge of how best to do a particular task is not well documented. Perhaps it’s only ever done by a single person. As soon as that person leaves the business, costs are often incurred by having to train new staff. Or the knowledge is lost and someone has to rework the whole process entirely.

Having a central process library that everyone can understand, provides a single source of truth for the organisation to leverage. This keeps everyone on the same page and minimises the disruption caused by staff turnover. 

Creating diagrams of business processes that can be understood by everyone – from the floor worker to the CEO is essential. Skore is a simple yet powerful process mapping and improvement tool that connects processes with roles, systems, costs, time and videos or documentation. It also leverages the easy-to-understand UPN methodology. Enabling users to create a multi-layered process library. A valuable asset for knowledge management and reducing unnecessary costs. 

If you’d like to chat about how Skore can help you have better knowledge management, or just find out more about the platform, please get in touch [email protected]