ReThink Productivity

An Unexpected Gift

2016-10-21T09:52:00.001+01:00

Success! You have some loyal customers and you have changed your relationship status.

We Know that around 5 positive experiences are required to offset a negative one and in any relationship there are bound to be ups and downs. In a personal relationship it may only take a number of small kind acts, like holding the door open or an unexpected kindness to create a positive emotional bank account – as Stephen Covey refers to creating relationships.

Why should it be any different for a relationship between a retailer and a customer? It’s not that easy to create a positive emotional balance with customers. Many retailers believe they create positive experiences by offering loyalty schemes (wallets and purses are becoming

stuffed full of extra cards), free gifts for purchasing increased volumes or money off vouchers to spend on your next shop. Savvy shoppers see through this and know they are aimed at “sweetening the deal” and or tying customers into repeat visits rather than solely for the customers’ benefit. The game changer is the “unexpected gift” or personal touch that turns a transaction into a positive experience. Online retailers send out unexpected gifts when delivering orders. It’s always great to receive a free sample or trial size product and if it’s targeted correctly it can really enhance the positive experience.

I recently ordered a new rabbit cage for my daughters’ two rabbits, an online purchase of some significance. It was delivered on time/ looked good and the box also contained a bag of rabbit food. I must admit I was quite impressed, I mentioned it to a number of other people and for the next few days we used it to feed the rabbits - who also seemed impressed. We changed to this brand! Obviously this does not work every time, however the potential for increasing sales may well not be the only real tangible benefit from this exercise, the behavioural response of the customer may well be enough by itself.

So far I haven’t mentioned any psychological reasoning to support the benefits of “unexpected gift giving” but there are numerous areas of research that give is an insight into why it could make a significant difference to our relationships.

The emotional response we seek from a meaningful gift experience is “gratitude”. This is a defined emotional state and explained well by Neel Burton MD.

“Gratitude never came easily to us human beings, and is a diminishing virtue in modern times. In our consumerist society, we focus on what we lack, or what other people have that we don’t, whereas gratitude is the feeling of appreciation for what we already have.

It is the recognition that the good in our life can come from something that is outside us and outside our control—be it other people, nature, or a higher power—and that owes little or nothing to us.”

Without doubt it's an area that requires much more research, however it is difficult to deny the findings and associated discussion provided by works like "The Psychology of Gratitude" By Robert A. Emmons, Michael E. McCullough. They persuasively argue that “gratitude” itself is such a positive emotion it can offset any number of negative emotions as well as ensure a higher level of memory recall of “pleasant” and “upbeat” emotions. Gratitude is such a strong emotional response that it ensures the experience is encoded and related to other similar episodes and therefore more easily retrieved from our long term memory. In layman’s terms when you feel gratitude the heightened positive emotional state ensures you remember it, so it can outweigh any negative experiences.

So, as a retailer in a relationship we desire our customers to feel “gratitude”; it means they feel special, they remember positive experiences and want to continue the relationship. As Robert A. Emmons, Michael E. McCullough suggest, one of the most common and reliable ways to obtain a person’s “gratitude” is by offering them an “unexpected gift”.

I am aware of the cost implications of giving “stuff” away however it is an opportunity to collaborate with other retailers/distributers and even promote relevant in house product. And an unexpected gift could be a friendly, caring interaction with one of your colleagues.

Let’s face it, we desperately want to give the “great” customer experience every time and from a psychological perspective “gratitude” is a fantastic start point.

I’d be interested in your thoughts, feedback and experience too, or any questions you might have, so if you want to drop me a line (Jon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk) I’d love to hear from you

Jon

Neel Burton MD

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hide-and-seek/201409/the-psychology-gratitude

“The Psychology of Gratitude”

By Robert A. Emmons, Michael E. McCullough

https://goo.gl/SdVuLh

It must be love!!

2016-06-06T09:06:00.002+01:00

Or, could it just be a great customer experience?

Or maybe just shopping? We’re a nation of shoppers these days!

A few years ago American Express published the results of a laboratory study on customer service and revealed that 53% of the participants that received great service showed the same neurological reactions that people get when feeling loved.

Whether or not the feeling of great service is akin to being in love is still up for debate. However if that feeling is a good one, then there is a high probability you would go looking for that experience again. The flip side of course sees us wanting to avoid negative experiences. Unfortunately for retailers humans are significantly more likely to remember the negative experiences and far more people pass on a bad experience than a good one. The psychological name for this behaviour is Negativity Bias, an evolutionary enhancement developed thousands of years ago to help Mr and Mrs Caveperson stay alive long enough to pass on their genes. Marelisa Fabrega (Ten Strategies for Overcoming the Negativity Bias and Increasing Your Quality of Life) explains

“Human beings developed a negativity bias—that is, they evolved to notice and respond more forcibly to the negative—since that helped our ancestors to stay alive. Thousands and thousands of years ago it was more important to escape negative situations than it was to approach opportunity”.

Baumeister et al., in their paper “Bad is Stronger than Good”, suggest that for each bad experience it requires at least five good ones to address the balance.

On the face of it this looks like bad news for retailers especially if your customer’s poor experience does not follow five or more good ones.

However it’s not all doom and gloom many of these areas of psychological research can help inform us how to generate service propositions that really work.

Back on the topic of love and romance Baumeister et al. say

“in a romantic relationship each partner can make an effort to be nice to the other consistently. Such small acts of kindness are important for combating the bads that will typically occur”.

Is there some learning here? We recognise that it’s important to ensure we are positively affecting the outcomes of each customer’s experience, but however simple that sounds it’s just not easy to do. Most retailers have a proposition in place that tries to create positive experiences yet even when you have a great service proposition backed up by a slick operation it’s just not easy to get it right for every customer, every time. And are most service propositions genuinely as customer focussed and simple as they could be?

So where does all this leave us? I’ve suggested that the complexities of the average “customer service proposition” are not getting to the source of the issue and in designing our “catch all” service policies we sometimes overlook the fundamentals. Good customer experiences are really about human nature. What drives us to feel “in love” with what we experience? What reduces the desire to protect ourselves from negative reminders of past issues? This is tough stuff to get right and no wonder many retailers don’t manage to deliver it as it is extremely complex. Yet it is the simplest and most basic of human caring behaviours that deliver a “loving” customer service experience.

Jon's next blog will investigate those human behaviours and what we as retailers can do to ensure in the simplest way, our customers feel loved.

Bad Is Stronger Than Good by Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer, and Kathleen D. Vohs; Review of General Psychology 2001. Vol. 5. No. 4. 323-370

Marelisa Fabrega (Ten Strategies for Overcoming the Negativity Bias and Increasing Your Quality of Life) https://daringtolivefully.com/overcoming-negativity-bias

The psychology of queueing

2016-04-04T13:16:00.002+01:00

With many years retail experience and a new degree in psychology; time spent studying about human behavior got me thinking about the experience of queueing.

A recent survey by Madbid.com, an online auction site, suggests the average adult spends 5 hours 35 minutes a month in a queue. Of which 53 minutes are spent in supermarkets, 33 minutes waiting to pay for clothes and 17 minutes waiting at customer service desks - I’m clearly not an average adult! Madbid.com want us to believe that online shopping will reduce this “waste of time”, however a poor online experience brings its own wastes of time and frustrations. And what is more important? - the length of time waiting or the way we experience the wait?

In psychological terms,“bad” queues create changed emotional states; especially queuing or waiting for anything where an individual identifies some sort injustice like queue jumping. This can even lead to higher levels of arousal such as anger or preparation for conflict - the fight or flight response. That’s probably what is going on for some people with the Black Friday scramble for bargains we saw on the news last year!

However there are “good” queues. Dr Joe Moran author of “Queueing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime” explains that queuing for an event (something that has been anticipated and probably has allocated seating) is part of a ritual and while waiting, you are amongst like minded individuals who are probably very excited with high expectations of their up and coming experience. This is a world away from the “bad” queues where it rapidly becomes “every man for himself”.

And you might like to think of yourself as a good queuer never given to flight or fight responses. Psychologist Dr Michael Sinclair suggests that it's not necessarily a trait of an individual to be a good queuer or not but behaviours are variable response depending on the type and place of the queue itself. As he remarks “the same people who push to get on the bus are the same people who wait patiently in other queues”.

So it seems that it’s the queuing process and how it is managed that shapes the experience and not the nature or personality of the individuals in the queue. In fact Barron, Haber and Rafaeli found in their research paper “The Effects of Queue Structure on Attitudes” that queue behaviour is really the result of the design of the waiting process. Perceived fairness is critical to good queue management and single line queues have been widely adopted in retail and wider businesses. I wouldn’t for one minute advocate that supermarkets, should only have one till lane, however they are increasingly introducing single line queues for self checkout.

Finally and as a bit of an aside, it seems that wherever you look or whoever you ask when trying to obtain anecdotal evidence of queue experience there is always one thing at the top of everyone’s list. Unopened booths/tills/selling points when other lanes have queues drives people mad!!!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23087024

http://iew3.technion.ac.il/Home/Users/anatr/Effects_of_queue.pdf

If you’d like help on effective staff planning solutions, identifying slick processes to optimise productivity and delight your customers; get in touch with Jon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk or visit www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk

Top trends that will impact retail productivity in 2016

2016-01-25T10:28:00.001+00:00

Who pays for the National Living Wage ?

2015-10-12T21:12:00.001+01:00

By 2020, everyone over 25 working 35 hours a week and previously earning October 2015's minimum wage of £6.70 will see their wages go up by around £4,000 a year!! Will your company see improved productivity, staff performance or customer service or will individual performance remain the same?

The Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that 60,000 people will lose their jobs as a result of the changes.This is partly because they believe it will mean firms recruit more under-25s, who will be on a lower rate. But George Osborne predicts that 1.1m jobs will be created as a result of the Budget overall (reductions in NI and Corporation tax), which would outweigh the losses.

Companies are starting to report how they intend to deal with the introduction of the National Living Wage (NLW). Next have said they may increase prices by circa 6pc whilst others (Ikea,Costa Coffee, Lidl and Starbucks) have announced they will move to the NLW (The Living Wage Foundation's current recommended minimal hourly rate is £7.85, and £9.15 inside London) with almost immediate effect but have not disclosed how they intend to fund this step change in staffing costs.

Ultimately it is going to be about either increasing the cost of your product (which kind of defeats the whole idea of NLW) and passing it on to your customer OR finding ways to think smarter about how you operate stores and understand workload to drive store staffing budgets from.

It can seem like a daunting task but really, once you break it down into manageable steps, each one giving you and your business better information on which to take future decisions, it becomes much more straightforward.Having a good understanding of what your workload is going to be will help to support your planning to make sure you're in good shape to continue to deliver despite the NLW challenges.

Simon

www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk

Christmas is changing

2015-01-08T20:35:00.002+00:00

Planning for Christmas used to be relatively easy. Whether it was working out where to build instore displays or looking at trade patterns to plan days off for colleagues and Christmas temps; it was just a case of dusting off last years’ plans and making an adjustment for how Christmas was going to fall in relation to the weekend. Not everyone got their Christmas planning right but with a little forethought every business had a reasonable chance of having good plans to execute.

Planning well for Christmas 2014 was a much trickier business with a number of things making it harder to plan effectively:

1. Black Friday is a relatively new phenomenon to UK High Streets that has been enthusiastically taken up by shoppers. Black Friday discounts were successful at driving sales yet do raise some concerns beyond the more disturbing photos of some frenzied shoppers eager to get their chosen bargain.

Black Friday has both affected margins and distorted trade patterns in 2014. Andy Street of John Lewis has been reported as saying “It is not in the interests of retailers to continue to grow the pace of Black Friday at the expense of other weeks”. All retailers will recognise the challenges of coping with huge peaks in demand and when commenting on the operational challenges caused by the Black Friday peak Andy Street said that while he felt John Lewis was ready for the peak” it was clear that some people were not”.

Retailers who held their nerve on Friday and held prices steady rather than cutting prices and margins were able to benefit from the extra high street footfall and willingness to spend online. Next retained a strong margin performance and had a much more manageable trading profile in the Christmas run up compared to some of their competitors.

2. Click and collect volumes grew again in 2014 yet many retailers are struggling to set up a slick processes that cope well with the operational challenges created by the Christmas peak in general and Black Friday in particular. John Lewis says that a massive 56% of their online orders at Christmas were fulfilled by click and collect. This trend looks set to grow further challenging the capacity of warehouse and delivery systems as well as the store processes. And customer expectations of Click and Collect are high. Customers see it as is easy and convenient; so letting them down with lengthy waits to collect goods they have already paid for can quickly damage customer perceptions and influence future shopping decisions.

3. Presents in 2014 are reported to have moved back to a more traditional present mix following a number of years when technology was the top of everyone’s Christmas wish list. 2014 has seen a return to gifts including beauty, fragrance and clothing. Indeed clothing retailers reported a late December surge in sales despite a warm season to date.

So how does all this help us plan effectively for the Christmas season in 2015? The only thing we can be certain of is more change. Online and click and collect both look set for more growth, but working out by how much within any one business is a tricky call. And for Black Friday 2015, despite Andy Street’s call for retailers to hold back, customers have built up an expectation of discounts that may be hard for retailers to roll back from.

If you’d like help to get ready for Christmas 2015 now – effective staff planning solutions, identifying slick processes to optimise productivity and delight your customers; get in touch with Simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk or visit www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk

The number of full-time staff per store fell to a record low in the third quarter as retailers shifted to smaller-format stores

2014-11-03T16:47:00.000+00:00

Retail Week last week published the article below on staffing levels which some alarming facts around the reduction of seasonal recruitment year on year and the fall in full time staff per store. What we won't see until January is if this impacts on Customer service and sales!!!

The BRC-Bond Dickinson Retail Employment Monitor revealed full-time equivalent jobs fell by 1.3% during the quarter despite a net rise in the number of stores.

Research showed a net increase of 505 stores in the third quarter as grocery retailers invested in smaller-format stores to increase their convenience propositions.

Non-food retailers contributed marginally to the 2.9% increase in stores for the first time in at least two years.

The number of full-time staff per store has now hit the lowest level since the inception of the monitor in 2008.

BRC director-general Helen Dickinson said: “This is the fifth month in a row where we have seen a decline in the number of hours worked in retail. This quarter’s fall of 1.3% in full-time equivalent jobs is, once again, driven by food retailers reacting to the significant structural changes that are ongoing across the industry.

“Consumers’ preference for convenience top-up shopping, greater competition within the grocery market and the impact of online is changing the grocery store model while operating costs continue to rise.

“However it is also worth remembering that as we approach the vital Christmas period, retailers will likely add a large number of temporary staff to their workforce to help them meet increased seasonal demand. Previously we have seen that a large percentage of these jobs turn into permanent positions.”

Some 42% of retailers included in the research intend to increase staffing levels in the next three months, compared with 72% this time last year.

The majority of retailers intend to keep staffing levels unchanged in the next three months, while the proportion intending to reduce staff numbers fell to 4% from 8% year-on-year.

The redundancy rate has also increased to the highest level since July 2013, according to the research.

Bond Dickinson head of retail employment Christina Tolvas-Vincent said: “Despite unemployment being at a six-year low, the retail sector, and particularly the grocery sector, is facing some serious challenges from continued pressure on household budgets, food inflation and the change in consumer shopping habits.

“Even the anticipation of Christmas appears muted this year in terms of recruitment, perhaps due to the weak wage increases reported across the UK.”

If you are interested in an informal chat about how Workforce Management could help your business find the right balance of staffing levels without damanging customer service, visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us at simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

3 Key Workforce Efficiency Tips

2014-09-12T11:20:00.001+01:00

Whether you routinely check your workforce efficiency or whether it’s something you’re just starting to look into, here are three tips to ensure the results are actually of value to you:

1) Undertake a detailed work study

A good work study gives you practical times for your stores' processes that can be used in subsequent planning. You need to measure and understand what actually happens through having eyes on the ground, conducting ‘Day in the Life of’ studies of your colleagues and both store and field leadership.

2) Identify opportunities for process improvement

Now you’re the proud owner of some really valuable data, you've effectively lifted the bonnet on your business and got down and dirty in the detail of what is happening in each store.

You can now see where there are discrepancies in how the processes are being run, where there are training requirements and where under or over resourcing is impacting customer experience. Now you know what is happening you can develop KPIs and measure it.

3) Develop a budget capability

The key piece is then figuring out HOW to use that data to the greatest effect and my advice is straight forward – keep it simple and develop a practical budgeting approach as a solid foundation for building a workforce management capability.

This is a credible and equitable way of allocating labour budgets across the organisation. Because you know the nuances of each of your stores you can be that much more sophisticated in your allocation.

Importantly this removes the ‘Store Management versus Head Office’ issue, which can arise if you DON’T have a visible, independent system of metrics that are published and transparent.

Once you understand the core principles underpinning your organisation you can start to build a workforce management capability, look at in-store forecasting, labour scheduling,

time & attendance as well as emerging areas of Employee Self Service, Task Management and shift bidding.

It can seem like a daunting task but really, once you break it down into manageable steps, each one giving you and your business better information on which to take future decisions, it becomes much more straightforward.

As we all return from our summer breaks and the key period of Christmas trading is fast approaching, challenges such as seasonal recruitment and click & collect strategy need to be just right. Having a good understanding of what your workload is going to be will help to support your planning to make sure you're in good shape.

Simon

www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk

The zero hours contract debate. What do you think?

2014-07-24T21:07:00.005+01:00

In June Business secretary Vince Cable announced a ‘crackdown’ on exclusivity clauses in zero hours contracts. He said that some ‘unscrupulous’ employers were abusing the flexibility offered by the system, to the detriment of their employees.

There was a flurry of activity in the media as reporters scuttled off to find the worst sort of examples of the worst sort of employer behavior. It makes great copy but, having worked both directly and indirectly in retail for nearly 20 years, I’ve had a lot of experience with zero hours contracts. I can safely say that I've never come across situations where people are promised hours only to have them snatched away at the last minute.

I’m not saying it doesn't ever happen although media reports suggest that it is not the retail sector where the majority of misuse is happening.. In reality I’ve found that zero hours contracts, when properly used, can be a powerful tool, which can be positive from both the employees and the employer’s point of view. This is especially true for employees who appreciate greater flexibility, such as students, those with caring responsibilities and parents of young children. They can also be the preferred option for semi retired people who are want to do some hours but don’t want to commit to regular shifts..

As with any tool, understanding when and how best to use it is critical to success with it. As a Work Force Management and retail productivity expert, Zero hours contracts are something i often get asked about. As part of a wider suite of different types of contract they can be brilliant for the flexibility they give workers and employers However, to use them well make sure:

1 .You understand your workload fully – you know what work there is to be done and when it needs to be done. Ideally you should undertake a time and motion type study to ground this knowledge in data

2. You understand how you need to allocate that work out to match customer demand– know what types of contract are available to you and how having a spread of different types of contract can help to best fulfil the workload and delight your customers

3. You have the right rota system in place - whether that’s a fully-fledged HR system or simple mobile application, you have to have something in place that enables flexible shifts to be accepted and confirmed. This creates an environment of clarity and agreement

4. Make sure your communication routes work well for any flexible workers you have, who may miss information passed across at regular team huddles. The key to having a happy flexible team is to ensure everyone feels a valued part of the team

Ultimately it’s not about having one type of contract rather than another.Being fully flexible is wrong, you need to have a core of stability in pretty much any business. Equally being fully static tends to be wrong too. Figuring out the right balance depends very much on your individual business proposition.

Getting that balance right and having the right mechanisms in place to ensure that there is good interaction between you and your employees as regards hours and shifts is absolutely critical to a happy, healthy and well-functioning operation.

Working with companies to help them achieve just that is something we’ve been doing for a long time and, as you can probably tell, the subject of zero-hours is something I feel passionate about.

I’d be interested in your thoughts, feedback and experience too, or any questions you might have, so if you want to drop me a line (simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk) I’d love to hear from you

Simon

www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-crackdown-on-zero-hours-contract-abusers

http://www.britishchambers.org.uk/press-office/press-releases/bcc-zero-hours-contracts-vital-for-flexible-jobs-market.html

Where does WFM fit?

2014-05-07T08:24:00.000+01:00

Last month the UK Institute of Customer Service Newsletter reported that they looked at different business models to see if one was better suited than another to providing great customer experience for customers. The report looked at 5 business models, including the John Lewis partnership model and the traditional corporate model, and found that each of the 5 models produced businesses at the top and bottom of the UK Customer Service institute (UKCSI) league table.

Great customer care is not assured by adopting one business model over another and in my view that is on no small part down to the fact the multiple factors, processes and individual employees all affect the customer experience on any given day in complex, interacting ways.

Workforce management processes are similarly complex. WFM is connected to a broad range of processes, issues and departments across an organisation – even in relatively small, UK based ones. It gets a whole lot more complicated for global WFM processes!

As with customer experience, any process that is so closely linked to people and how they behave within a whole set of defined rules and unwritten working practices gets complicated very quickly.

Like customer experience, WFM programmes aren't a guaranteed success if set up in any one standardised way or owned by a particular department or function. The reality is there is a complex set of stakeholders behind WFM, with every stakeholder able to contribute to the success or failure of a programme at pretty much any stage of its life.

This complex picture means that a good WFM vendor needs to have great project and account management skills so they can:

Understand the needs of the business – not just the written brief but can really get under the skin of how the organisation really works when allocating, deploying and optimising resources
Connect with a range of functions and departments across the organisation- if retail ops hold the budget, you still need to work closely with HR and finance.
Manage stakeholders effectively and really understand where and how decisions are made – and it may not be in a formal meeting

Implementing and running WFM processes is difficult and many vendors don’t truly understand the realities and variance within businesses.

As well as looking for a vendor that ticks boxes on your requirements list, look for a team you can really work with that takes time to understand your business and the people in it.

If you are interested in an informal chat about how Workforce Management could help your business, how an independent consultant can articulate your requirements and help you navigate this complex and rapidly changing market, visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us at simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

How much does it cost to fill a shelf ?

2014-03-18T08:40:00.000+00:00

It can be very expensive if you are not using the appropriate resource to do it!!

Leaders are one of the most cherished and expensive resources in every business. How they (and increasingly field leadership) spend their time is becoming more and more important for organisations to understand and clarify, as operating costs are tightened and the importance of delivering great service for customers is increasingly important.

3 key benefits of understanding how leadership time is spent ?

1. You now have the data and can make informed decisions.

Organisations are amazed at how time is actually spent by leaders compared to their expectation. Ask yourself how much time on average does your leadership spend developing and coaching their team versus replenishing and working on the till? Should this be the same by large store and small store? Probably not, but what should it be? And what about time spent with customers or tackling shrinkage?

Having the data that shows how leaders are spending their time, allows you to review the time spent on the priorities you have set for their role and business.

2. You can clarify role expectations to reduce variance and deliver your brand promises.

Clarifying the expectation of how time is spent by role, and format of store is the building block to create a consistent customer experience across stores and build a leadership team with a clear and consistent vision who are empowered to deliver.

3. Feed in to Organisational Design

If you are looking to restructure, understand how time is currently spent can be invaluable to support evidence based decision making

ReThink can independently capture and quantify how your leaders are spending their time to enable you to help focus your precious leadership resources on driving your business priorities

If you are interested in an informal chat about understanding how store/field leaders spend their time, and the value this independent insight can bring visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

The gift of independence

2014-02-20T13:30:00.000+00:00

The gift of independent advice should not be underestimated. Getting great advice and insight to drive your business is invaluable, especially when you are considering complex and sometimes high cost products and services. ReThink is a completely independent Productivity and Workforce management Consultancy. Not all Productivity and Workforce Management Consultancies are! Some are only able to represent a single product provider, while others will have a strictly limited 'panel' of suppliers they will suggest to you.

As independent experts ReThink, offer you innovative, practical and cost effective solutions to support you in achieving your business objectives.

ReThink have over 20 years of Productivity and Workforce Management experience across Europe and Asia Pacific, combined with 10 years retail store management and head office experience. ReThink can help you: independently select the right Workforce Management partner to fit your business requirements, help you set up a structured change programme and provide you with a workload and budget model to allow you to get the resource levels right in every store now, and forecast salary requirement for future predicted volumes through your chosen Workforce Management partner.

Working with some of the largest companies across Europe ReThink can bring industry leading thinking to any business. Services include:

Sarah Chitty,Senior HR Business Partner,Republic said “ReThink not only provided us with a workload driven wages model but also a significant amount of retail knowledge and experience which benefited the project overall. ReThink integrated well within the team, supported and challenged where needed and were always on hand to assist with any queries or questions.”

Visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

How are you supporting local leaders to create a happy workforce and delighted customers?

2014-01-20T15:28:00.000+00:00

In every service based industry, your workforce is your most important asset. There are many, interrelated factors that need to align in order for you to have a happy workforce, with appropriate skills, knowledge and great customer behaviours. It requires a good corporate culture combined with inspirational leadership to underpin successful customer interactions.

Very few organisations deliver a consistently great experience to every single customer every day. Yet many are striving to do so and there are some simple steps that can help increase the likelihood of delivering great customer care and help your leaders make the best decisions.

Your workforce is your most important issue and in many service industries a significant spend that directly impacts your bottom line. So how could some basic workforce management functions support you deliver great customer care every time?

1. Resource to deliver your corporate service standards

Ensure you understand the resource required to deliver to your defined service standards by thoroughly understanding the tasks and associated workload. It requires activity to create a well stocked and presented store, to present promotions to best effect and to achieve the sort of customer conversations your brand promise depends on.
Work study will allow you to understand the workload for each location and the associated salary budget required to deliver your service standards. It supports organisations to allocate salary by store effectively and enables business leaders to make quick, evidence based resourcing decisions.

2. Meet Customer Demand - all day, every day

Once you understand the salary allocation for each outlet, you can support local managers break down their periodic salary budget and plan activities to best meet customer demand using a range of tools. These tools can be based on simple spreadsheets with an easy to use front end attached or can be more complex systems that link through to or provide your payroll functions.
There are a wide range of options available and independent advice can help you choose the right option for your business.

3. Enable flexible working for colleagues

Delivery of great customer experience is linked to having a happy team and ensuring you have the best employees available to you. Increasingly colleagues want the ability to work flexibly and employers that facilitate more flexibility will have the capacity to attract and retain the best people. (How well do you cope when your best people wish to return part time after maternity leave, take on caring responsibilities within their family or simply want to remain in work but do less hours?). Planning systems allow local managers to easily manage the sort of complex staffing plans that are required to facilitate flexible working. Have you considered what difference it would make to your customers and business if your team could work more flexibly?

4. Integrated Analytics

Workforce systems provide key statistics on how well each location is doing in meeting one of the essentials for great customer care - availability. Leading businesses take the opportunity to use key workforce systems stats to data from other sources to create insights and better understand return on investment in their most important asset.

Re Think provides independent and practical advice and consultancy to support businesses to deliver their customer strategy and brand promise for all four of the above elements. For more information visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or email simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

Scheduling your Customers!!!!!!!

2013-09-24T16:05:00.000+01:00

Scheduling your customers now that's a thought. Helping smooth your workload and create a nice steady flow across the day. Reducing periods of overstaffing (where there are more Colleagues than Customers) and Understaffing (where Customers experience queuing or a reduced service level due to Colleagues being too busy). It may be more of a reality than you think, have you ever:

Booked a delivery slot for your home shopping?
Arranged an appointment to see your Bank Manager?
Bought something from Argos and been given a collection number?
Visited DisneyLand and used a Fast Pass or the RideMax software to plan which rides to go on in which order ?

These are examples of where the company is effectively scheduling your time in the queue, to reduce your waiting time and help them plan how many Colleague they need more effectively. Companies are exploring and developing this kind of "pre booked" shopping experience as we speak, in the near future you will be able to book appointments in real time to:

Select your new mobile phone
See you Doctor/Pharmacist/Optician
Buy a new car
Pay for your shopping

The first steps to making these kinds of offers to possible to Customer are:

Understanding Workload

How and when should I make the appointments available to the Customer? How long will each appointment take? These are all questions any business should have the answers for to ensure they add value for customers, resource is not wasted on things that don't matter and salary can be allocated appropriately and equitably.
Conducting a Work study and inviting the right independent experts to review you business operation will answer all of these questions and much more.

Work Study, or Time & Motion as it is commonly known, brings images of stop watches, disruption and a high price tag. Application of new technology is changing this.
Palm computers (PDA's) are now deployed to capture data; increasing accuracy, data granularity and speeding up analysis. Disruption to customers and store colleagues is minimal with expert study teams blending in to the background. And with the best providers the price tag is reasonable.
The results of a work study will deliver standard times (see example below) for all aspects of the store operation and customer facing activities and can typically be tailored by store type/format. The granularity provides opportunities to understand how time is being spent and benchmark the process against peers. Additional techniques can be used to also provide a view of how store managers spend their time and how the store team's time is split up across the trading day versus customer footfall, helping you understand where the opportunity to Schedule Customers can be accessed.

Effective Workforce Management (WFM) solution:

An effective Workforce Management solution would be able to offer up options based on the working times, location and colleague availability to cover the customer demand, maximising service and cost. This can automated via a text or e-mail to the appropriate line manager.

Plans could have been adjusted within minutes to see the service and cost impact of moving colleagues to cover or bringing colleagues in for extra hours. This could then be automatically communicated to colleagues to avoid minimal disruption for customers.

If you are interested in an informal chat about how Workforce Management and Work Study could help your business, how an independent consultant can articulate your requirements and help you navigate this complex and rapidly changing market, visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us at simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

The death of the physical Time and Attendance clock

2013-05-23T13:25:00.001+01:00

A physical Time and Attendance (T&A) clock, attached to the wall and plugged in to the store network has been the tried and trusted way when implementing the T&A element of Workforce Management (WFM) for retailers.This approach always has numerous costly and opertional challenges:

High initial investment in physical clocks (clocks prices range between £400 - £1,500 each), increasing the overall project budget significantly
Cost of clock installation and network connection for each clock
Ongoing cost of replacing damaged/faulty clocks
Upkeep of swipe cards/fobs/bio-metric readers

Retail teams want something different to the very old fashioned approach of punching your card when you start and leave work! Store colleagues are constantly in touch with friends via smart phones and appreciate a more engaging and interactive approach from their employer. Colleagues like being keep kept up to date on the business and being able to access their information, book holiday etc via their own and company devices.

New technology and innovative thinking is quickly making this possible. WFM vendors now give you the ability to use a smart phone app or soft/web clock to access self service options which can sit on any PC/tablet/phone that has an Internet browser. Self service options include checking shifts, arranging shift swaps, requesting holiday and updating personal contact details. This easy access technology opens up new options for retailers:

Use your existing hardware as clocks (tills etc)
Opening up more locations for store colleagues to clock
Investing in tablets/PCs rather than clocks to deliver a clocking mechanism as well as a colleague engagement portal
Allowing colleagues to clock via their own smart phone using the WFM vendors app and GPS technology
Option to connect low cost USB bio-metric readers to preserve data integrity

In summary these new options help reduce the upfront and ongoing cost of the WFM implementation, as well a providing new ways of engaging with colleagues. The need to spend vast amounts on physical clocks in no more.

In a market with technological change and increasing options for ever more global vendors it can be hard for retailers to navigate their way to a solution that best suits their requirements, is user friendly, quick to deploy, affordable and optimises benefits over and above those traditionally available from WFM.

If you are interested in an informal chat about how Workforce Management could help your business, how an independent consultant can articulate your requirements and help you navigate this complex and rapidly changing market, visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us at simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

The Workforce Management Evolution

2013-02-12T14:53:00.003+00:00

The Workforce Management (WFM) landscape is changing rapidly. Gone are the days of lengthy, expensive deployments involving complex solutions with hundreds of consultancy days, and having to buy an expensive clock to put on the wall of every shop to enable your store colleague to clock in/out.

The WFM industry is changing in other ways too. Long standing WFM vendors are being acquired or merging with wider payroll and HR companies. New vendors with intuitive solutions are coming to the UK market from Europe, America and Australia, solely focused on the user experience rather than the technical 'bells and whistles'. Large WFM vendors are having to up their game to keep up with the innovation and accessible price models that are now available.

As a result of all this change in the market, solutions are:

easier to set up and use

more local control less automation

can be easily connected to more business systems (EPOS,Footfall,CEM) than ever

accessible via mobile technology

clocking in/out can be performed on any browser based PC/till

Solutions are implemented at pace driving a quicker return on investment and visibility of the workforce than was previously achievable.

The cost models for WFM are changing too. Software as a Service (SaaS), the ultimate 'plug and play' option gets round all those heavy hardware costs, cross country deployment issues, internal IT resource and managing ongoing release cycles. Although not appropriate for every businesses, SaaS will certainly feature heavily in the WFM evolution. A number of WFM vendors have already gone down the SaaS only route as their deployment strategy.

In summary WFM is going on an exciting journey. There has never been a time where there was so many vendors to consider, so many solutions that are user friendly, quick to deploy and affordable.

If you are interested in an informal chat about how Workforce Management could help your business, and how an independent consultant can understand your requirements and help you navigate this complex and rapidly changing market, visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us at simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

Sorry, we are closed due to short staffing

2012-11-20T19:22:00.001+00:00

Closing in retail stores due to short staffing (caused by sickness, vacancies or bad planning), isn't an option. Staff shortages mean the customer experience is diluted, customers may have to wait longer in line at the checkout or not be able to find that store colleague to ask about a product.
In other industries it is seemingly easier to put the 'closed' sign up as per the example below tweeted by London Midland trains:

How could this have been fixed without having to cancel departures? Although no one can predict sickness, this problem could largely be prevented by effective Workforce Management (WFM) practices:

An effective Workforce Management solution would be able to offer up options based on the working times, location and colleague availability to cover the short staffing due to sickness as soon as these colleagues had not registered for work. This can automated via a text or e-mail to the appropriate line manager.

Plans could have been adjusted within minutes to see the service and cost impact of moving colleagues to cover the station or bringing colleagues in for extra hours. This could then be communicated to colleagues to avoid minimal disruption for customers.

Colleagues can become set in fixed shift patterns; yet a little, planned flexibility in working patterns across all colleagues can go a long way to providing extra cover for absences. An fixed patterns tend to create a reluctance to change as customer shopping habits, travel patterns and delivery times change. The result is an in-balance of colleagues to customer demand and workload (over staffing on quiet days and under staffing on busy days).
Who pays the price for these resource mis matches? Ultimately you do as customers vote with their feet and spend their hard earned cash elsewhere. In a world where feedback is invited about customers' shopping and travel experiences it's easy for companies to see the effect of sub optimal resource planning on their customer satisfaction scores over the days and hours of the week.

Re Think Productivity is helping retailers and pharmacies to get it resourcing right for customers through WFM to drive customer loyalty and control costs. Simple excel based planning can start the journey with more sophisticated planning available via the new generation of compelling WFM software that is focused on intuitive user experience, simpler/quicker implementation and can provide management reporting that shows how you are planning to get if right for the customer Following work with Republic to help them get the right resource levels in each store, Sarah Chitty, Senior HR business partner at Republic said " ReThink not only provided us with a workload driven budget model but also a significant amount of retail knowledge and experience which benefited the project overall. ReThink integrated well within the team,supported and challenged where needed and were always on hand with and queries or questions."

Visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk, follow us on twitter @Rethinkp or e-mail us simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

Seasonal recruitment top 5 tips

2012-10-16T11:05:00.000+01:00

As peak trades approaches retailers are putting plans in to place to recruit significant numbers of seasonal colleagues; recent press reports include M&S 20,000, Sainsburys 15,000, Amazon 10,000 colleagues. This year more than ever I expect the challenge to recruit, train and deploy these colleagues effectively to maximize sales and customer satisfaction will be the key to a successful peak trading period.So these are my top tips for winning when recruiting for seasonal colleagues.

1. Recruit flexibly - Before you even place an advert for your vacancies take some time to think about where you can make best use of additional resource. What data do you have to help? Forecast/last years sales by day and footfall data are all useful indicators of how your trade will uplift. It may feel attractive to recruit full time but, to give yourself maximum flexibility, try to stick to 12 - 16 hour per week contracts and don't get stuck to full day shifts fixed to specific days of the week. This approach gives you the flexibility to move shifts around across the week (especially weekends) and flex colleagues working hours up as required without incurring premium rate overtime, whilst giving colleagues the security of a minimum number of weekly hours.

2. Invest in training - Induct seasonal colleagues as if they were permanent. It is all too common for seasonal colleagues to be given minimal training before being placed on a till or replenishing stock. It is vital that they understand the core business values, are familiar with the sales floor and products so they can deliver your customer service expectation. It is equally important that they are provided with uniform and a name badge. Customers will demand a consistent brand experience whatever the time of year.

3. Good Scheduling - By recruiting flexibly you can now let your labour scheduling system make the maximize the use of hours to match shifts against workload and customer demand. Ensure all data for seasonal colleagues is entered promptly and schedules are published far enough in advance to give notice of shift patterns. Colleague self service and shift bidding (via social media and mobile) are emerging technologies from the Workforce management vendors that allow you to provide unfilled shifts and holiday booking to the workforce.Be careful not to exclude the non mobile part of your workforce if you utilise this approach!!

4. Correct pay - The easiest way to disengage any colleague is to pay them incorrectly, especially if they are only with you for a short time and are relying heavily on this newly found income. Make sure you are tracking worked hours accurately and seasonal colleagues understand how this tracking process works (via a clock,till, signing in book). No matter how busy it gets, investigate exceptions to the published schedule to ensure correct payment. The flexibility and low weekly contracts you established during recruitment and effective scheduling should avoid you needing to use premium overtime.

5. Retain the best - Some of the best permanent colleagues started out as seasonal temps. Identify the star performers and look to offer them permanent contracts wherever possible. Turnover in retail is notoriously high so just because you have no vacancies today doesn't mean you won't have one tomorrow.

If you would like to talk to a retail work force management expert with practical experience of leading retail businesses through the busy seasonal periods, ReThink Productivity provides the solution for you. Sarah Chitty, Senior HR business partner at Republic said " ReThink not only provided us with a workload driven budget model but also a significant amount of retail knowledge and experience which benefited the project overall. ReThink integrated well within the team,supported and challenged where needed and were always on hand with and queries or questions."

If you are interested in Workforce Management for your business, visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us at simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

The Click and Collect Christmas rush.Are you ready?

2012-09-13T08:58:00.000+01:00

Many retailers established in bricks and mortar have not managed to apply the standard of process clarity and compliance in their existing business to their new channels, and have not really managed to fully integrate this new activity into their overall store operation.

It’s not surprising. Customer behaviour is shifting quickly - customers are already moving on from choosing one route from the newer and existing channels; they now use all of them, switching between channels during one purchase cycle and, thanks to smart phones, even during their shopping trip.

And this multi channel switching will continue to grow, with increasing smart phone uptake and as retailers experiment with free wifi for customers in their stores.

So what do operators need to do differently? The operational challenges come when an existing store operation has to accommodate extra processes, and it is most often click and collect.

Click and collect is great for customers, you can tell by the growing volume of orders your store team handle! Yet many retailers have not really nailed down best practices; they’ve just not been in it long enough and volumes are not at steady state. On top of all that, volumes vary significantly across the store estate and separate e commerce teams often don’t have a thorough appreciation of the workload involved at a store level. This makes effective salary budgeting for the in store end of click and collect almost impossible.

That’s why when you use click and collect as a customer things don’t run as smoothly as you imagined! Challenges can be:

You struggle to find somebody to collect your parcel from, and even if there is a clear collection point there isn’t always someone there to help you
You wait ages for your parcel because the storage is miles from the collection point and the storage and retrieval systems are a little chaotic
You get either no or lots of texts reminding you to collect your parcel because the under resourced store team don’t get the checking in and out processes right

So are you ready for the Christmas click and collect rush?

If you aren’t, it’s not too late. ReThink can help you set up your best practise and provide you with a workload and budget model to allow you to get the resource levels right in every store now and in forecast salary requirement for future predicted volumes.

ReThink can help to:

Review your existing processes,
Draw on learning cross industry best practise, support you in establishing best practice
Conduct time study work so you understand your current workload resource requirement
Provide a model to allow you to forecast resource requirements as your volumes rise

Visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

Looking to reduce salary costs? Time for a ReThink

2012-09-03T19:13:00.002+01:00

The high street is in transition. What the future of the high street looks like no one really knows, the one certainty is that those retailers who deliver a great customer experience will be ahead of the pack and in growth rather than decline.

UK ICS suggests "Almost half of business leaders admit to cutting back on service operations during the recession (47%). Between juggling rising labour costs and assigning staff members additional responsibility, it is becoming more difficult for store managers to motivate employees to deliver a quality customer experience."

All successful businesses recognise the need to invest every penny carefully and that is particularly true during testing retail trading periods when the economy is stagnating.

The challenge is to understand which costs your business invests make a difference to the customer and which ones can be saved. ReThink productivity are retail experts who help retailers understand the cost basis of their operating model, how it flexes during times of growth and where there are opportunities to invest salary budget costs more effectively.

If you are thinking of reviewing how you understand your workload and the solutions you use to manage your workforce, ReThink Productivity provides the expertise for you.

John Wilde, Managing Director, Productivity Solutions Limited UK said “With a wealth of Retail Experience; Simon has the rare skill of being able to translate the power of Work Study data in a way that retailers understand and can link to their Workforce Management systems; whilst translating opportunities into realistic solutions and tangible project deliverables. Simon has a broad and in-depth knowledge of WFM Systems - enabling him to match the right solution for our clients. PSL have no hesitation in recommending Simon as an outstanding retail solution deliverer. “

If you are interested in an informal chat about how Workforce Management could help your business, deliver a great customer experience visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us at simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

How to win GOLD in Workforce Management

2012-08-09T14:13:00.001+01:00

Top athletes have been inspiring us with their success and we have all been working out what we can apply from their regimes to our more ordinary fitness routines. It seems to me that largely all the top athletes follow some sensible common sense regimes, work really hard at them and top it off with some personalisation to make sure they get their best performance when it really counts. And it turns out that going for gold in Workforce Management requires a similar approach - although with a lot less hard work if you do it right! So these are my top tips for winning at Workforce Management.

1. Set your Goals - Be clear what you want to achieve for your business and customers. It can be easy to get swept along in a whirl of new technology that does all sorts of things you really don't need.
Be clear on what you want to achieve.

2. Understand your workload - How long does it take to process a till transaction? How long does it take to replenish an item of stock? How much time in the day do we spend adding value to our business? How long do we spend with customers? Where are the opportunities to streamline our processes? These are all questions any business should have the answers to to ensure they add value for customers, resource is not wasted on things that don't matter and salary can be allocated appropriately and equitably.

Conducting a Work study and inviting the right independent experts to review your business operation will answer all of these questions and much more.

3. Budgeting - Once you know the workload by store and how you want your colleagues to add value for your customers, a simple budget allocation tool helps you get every single store set up to deliver your operational standards and customer experience every time.

Without using a workload based model you will be spending more money than needed in some locations and stifling success by under investment in others. Not the way to be a champion retailer!

4. Planning - Customers will only get a great experience in your stores every time if the total salary budget is spread over the weeks, days and minutes to match the workload and customer flow. The purpose of planning is to make sure you have the right number of colleagues at the right time, every time. There are lots of options to create your staffing plans, from the simple to the very sophisticated. A good independent expert can help you navigate the options available and choose the right solution for you.

5. Analytics - Really add value when it helps you identify actionable insights that drive benefits for your business.

To do this you need to be able to correlate between multiple data points. For example integrating store schedules and customer satisfaction scores by time of day and day of week will tell you some interesting things about the impact of your schedules and operational practices on your customers. And I guarantee it is so actionable that even the least experience operator would know what they needed to change!

6. Get a great coach - Like all the top athletes will tell you, having an expert who can push you to do your best can make the difference when going for gold.

If you are thinking of reviewing how you understand your workload and the solutions you use to manage your workforce, ReThink Productivity provides the coaching for you. John Wilde, Managing Director, Productivity Solutions Limited UK said “With a wealth of Retail Experience; Simon has the rare skill of being able to translate the power of Work Study data in a way that retailers understand and can link to their Workforce Management systems; whilst translating opportunities into realistic solutions and tangible project deliverables. Simon also has a broad, yet in- depth knowledge of WFM Systems - enabling him to match the right solution for our clients. PSL have no hesitation in recommending Simon as an outstanding retail solution deliverer. “

If you are interested in winning gold in Workforce Management for your business, visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us at simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

Workforce Management Analytics - 3 golden rules

2012-06-21T20:48:00.003+01:00

As Workforce Management solution vendors strive to differentiate themselves from their competitor, add value for their customers and justify their prices, many of them are going down the route of offering enhanced analytics.

All managers know the power of the right killer insight at the right time and the old management adage "that what gets measured gets managed" still largely stands. However busy managers generally make the biggest difference to their businesses on their sales floor, developing their understanding of how their particular set of customers respond and coaching their teams. More reports to review and action in the office is not on most operators wish list!

So here are my three golden rules for assessing whether any analytics tool is right for your business

1. Accessibility

Any analytics tool needs to be intuitive and easy to use for the target audience. If a tool requires an instruction book in one hand and your statistics degree in the other then it won't suit the average head office or field user.
It's essential to ensure the tool does standard views of the information and data cuts you regularly want to view - quickly. And if you can simply select data to export into excel to correlate against other business performance data that is as much as most users require.
The apps and graphics we all have access to outside work really set a high standard for business systems to achieve. Make sure you get a solution that is genuinely easy and intuitive to navigate and produces easy to interpret, visual outputs.

2. Appropriate

Make sure you have a clear understanding of who will use the data outputs and what they want to do with them.It sounds obvious, yet if you don't have a clear set of requirements it's easy to be seduced by an overcomplicated system that really does not suit your needs.
So ask yourself, who is the data for? How do they want to use it? Do I have other data sets I want to use this alongside? Do I need the outputs to feed into other systems? Are the formats compatible or will I have to reformat data?
And do make sure that the system does not calculate things at a level of spurious accuracy and sophistication that is totally irrelevant to the real world where people turn up to work and their managers attempt to ensure they are paid correctly for the hours they work.

3 Actionable

Analytics that produce standard reports is just management information pretending to be something more than it really is. Many of the new analytics tools are a way of reporting the same old information better presented and faster than before. Useful; but not a way to create a step change in performance.
Analytics really adds value when it can help you identify actionable insights that allow you to drive benefits for your business.
To do this you need to be able to correlate between multiple data points. For example integrating store schedules and customer satisfaction scores by time of day and day of week will tell you some interesting things about the impact of your schedules and operational practices on your customers. And I guarantee it is so actionable that even the least experience operator would know what they needed to change!
Working out which data to use and how to avoid costly and complicated data integration issues is something to consider carefully.
Ultimately the Analytics module in a Workforce Management solution needs careful consideration before implementation and might best be considered for its suitability to perform your routine reporting. Either way make sure you have a really savvy operational analyst in your head office team who knows the best correlations and efficient data sources for your business.

ReThink can help you independently select the right Workforce Management partner to fit your business requirements, help you set up a structured change programme and provide you with a workload and budget model to allow you to get the resource levels right in every store now, and forecast salary requirement for future predicted volumes through your chosen Workforce Management partner.

Visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

The Number 1 Question - can I have next week off?

2012-05-30T16:31:00.000+01:00

Leaders in any service led industry have felt the pain when they get their holiday planning wrong and end up short staffed and chasing their tails while they let customers down - it has happened to us all! We've also all felt the impact of trying to make plans with family and friends and not being sure we can have the time off. School holidays are key holiday times to either be with your family or make sure you avoid to get a cheaper child -free holiday!

Fortunately there are some tools that can help make planning time off as painless as possible for all parties and new technology developments are changing things too.

The key to planning your resource at any time of year is to know your workload. Understanding the workload and your resource requirement is key to a smooth experience for customers and colleagues alike. Conducting a Work study and inviting the right independent experts to review you business operation will support quantifying workload and much more.

New technology means we can all move on from the all important diary that logs all the days off and holiday plans - and always gets put somewhere "safe" just when you need it. And it helps avoid counting back the days and trying to find old staff time sheets to work out how many hours a colleague has left to book this year. Self service via Time & Attendance clocks, Tills, PC's and every type of smart phone has arrived! Colleagues can request holidays, know when they have been confirmed and keep track of how many holiday hours they have taken. They can even see basic hours worked and any overtime due to be paid, update their personal details, log flexible hours when they are willing to work and bid for any extra shifts that have been made available.

Life is simpler for the manager. All requests for changed shifts, time off etc are received electronically , the manager signs them off and they are tracked in the system. (No more holiday diaries to go astray!)

Systems available can also track other absences such as lieu time and sickness. Powerful HR data is produced with the ability to analyse it for an individual colleague right up to corporate level. The ideal number of holiday hours can be determined against the workload each week ensuring that Customer Service is not impacted,whilst ensuring colleague have the opportunity to take their full entitlement across the year.

Colleagues expect a level of technology in the workplace that matches their at home experience. There are lots of different solutions available, we can help you find the right one for your business.

If you are thinking of reviewing how you understand your workload and the solutions you use to manage your workforce,ReThink Productivity are independent experts who can help.

Other services we provide include WFM strategies, an independent simple review of current operational processes, independent WFM vendor selection, work study and wage budget model development.

Visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk
E-mail us simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

How understanding workload can help your business reduce costs and reinvest in customer service

2012-05-24T21:09:00.000+01:00

How long does it take to process a till transaction? How long does it take to replenish an item of stock? How much time in the day do we spend adding value to our business? How long do we spend with customers? Where are the opportunities to streamline our processes? These are all questions any business should have the answers to ensure they add value for customers, resource is not wasted on things that don't matter and salary can be allocated appropriately and equitably.
Conducting a Work study and inviting the right independent experts to review you business operation will answer all of these questions and much more.

The most important thing a work study delivers is the ability to truly understand the workload in each store and use the standard times to build a salary budget from the bottom up. You can ensure a fair and equitable allocation of your salary pot based on business volume drivers and your policies.
And if you are looking to understand your salary spend to free up more time for customers, investing in a Work Study allows you to make informed, evidence based decisions to reduce spend in a way that does not affect the things that are important to your customers.
Re Think Productivity is helping retailers,manufacturers and pharmacies to get it right for their customers through a thorough understanding of workload and how to best match to their finite resources.
With challenging trading conditions on the high street now is the time to re-evaluate your salary investment strategies, Re Think can provide an independent, practical review of your current processes and support your business with strategic recommendations.

Visit our website www.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or e-mail us at simon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk

Workforce Management is a Change project NOT an IT project

2012-05-15T16:58:00.001+01:00

Whatever Workforce Management partner you are considering or currently work with don't be fooled that implementing software will answer all your problems, the reality is that once implemented you will realise that you have more problems than you started with, as new and more powerful information becomes available. Your business has to change in order to maximise the benefits, to meet the new challenges, and sustain the Workforce Management system you have or are about to invest in.

Few Workforce Management projects are successfully sustained and although the software partner is easy to blame, the projects are not sustained due to change not being adopted NOT the software.

Yet managing change well is a challenging process. It is, in a sense, a way of creating the future. True change management doesn’t just involve getting through the change, coping with the change, or surviving the change; instead it requires careful construction of a process that will lead to successful implementation of the change for you and your colleagues or employees. Being successful at bringing change into reality at your organisation requires that you first understand some foundational points such as the process of change.

The Process of Change

There are a multitude of change management models that you can follow in order to manage through change. However, each model takes into consideration the individual and his or her response to change.

1. Denial

The general process of change begins with the change being presented to the group. There is a general environment of denial. Thoughts are shared, such as ‘this isn’t necessary,’ ‘the way we’ve always done things works just fine.’ In this way, the group’s focus is on the past. They have a kind of ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it,’ attitude. They are still in denial of the need for the change. Other emotions that the group will express may include: shock, discouragement, disbelief, anxiety, uncertainty and immobilisation.

2. Resistance

At this point, the individual will feel resistant to change. Individual performance may start to suffer. The manager will face a challenge in overcoming the resistance of each individual because each person will respond differently. It will take being attentive to what is happening with each individual in order to successfully overcome their resistance. Some of the behaviours or ‘symptoms’ a manager may see in this stage include: Suffering, anger, loss of productivity, confusion over roles and future, bargaining, feeling of loss of control and loss of trust or commitment.

They may be confused about what exactly the change will mean for them. Will they still have a job? Will they be expected to do things they don’t know how or don’t want to know? Will they be able to work the same shifts? Will they have to become fully flexible?

It is at this point that good change management processes can help the individual to move from focusing on the past way of doing things to the new way. Management can reassure the individual, work to rebuild trust and commitment, and champion the change as a model of it for their employees.

3. Exploration

The next stage occurs when the individual begins to accept that the future will involve the change. She now begins to consider what the change will actually mean to her individually. Managers should be prepared to share a lot of information and expect a lot of questions at this point.

This is a sort of learning phase for the individual. They’ve accepted that this is how it’s going to be; now they want to tentatively figure out what it will be like. There are several different things that the manager can help the individual do in order to get through this phase: manage stress, clearly define the vision, communicate new values, identify the strengths of the new situation, seek benefits and opportunities, reaffirm there is no going back, educate, Train, and clarify.

4. Commitment

In the final stage of the change process, the individual has become committed to the change and to the remainder of the process in getting there. At this point you can expect to see some positive behaviour from your employees, such as: modelling the new behaviour, taking responsibility for implementing the change, asking questions that show proactive thinking in how to proceed towards the ‘model’, assisting others through the change process, focusing on the future – both to the final implementation of the change and beyond.

At this point, the employee is part of the change, not just in agreement with it.

Realise that your employees will all reach this phase at different points. Some may move from denial to commitment rather quickly, while others may need more support from you or other leadership in order to feel comfortable progressing through the stages. You will need to be patient but firm during this time as you help each employee make the transition to commitment.

Whatever business you are in, you know that change is the only thing that is constant.

ReThink can help you independently select the right Workforce Management partner to fit your business requirements, help you set up a structured change programme and provide you with a workload and budget model to allow you to get the resource levels right in every store now, and forecast salary requirement for future predicted volumes through your chosen Workforce Management partner.