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March, 2005

Empowering Employees

Standardizing the workforce helps retailers improve employee productivity and customer service.

March, 2005

By: Robert Farina, CEO, Cybershift

To ensure superior customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, retailers must implement standard practices and procedures that generate positive in-store experiences while working to alleviate negative factors that can result in unsatisfied or displeased customers. Employee productivity and morale is undeniably tied to customer satisfaction and Web-based workforce management systems can improve employee satisfaction and productivity levels that in turn eliminate inefficiencies, drive sales and enable retailers to achieve superior customer service levels.

Time reporting and scheduling is often overlooked when organizations are charged with finding new ways to achieve savings and boost employee and customer satisfaction. Empowering employees to directly access information and make absence, leave or shift-change requests online enables them to feel an integral part of the business, contributing to the overall success of the retail store. This flexibility and the ease-of-use offered by Web-based workforce management solutions foster collaboration and camaraderie amongst the employee base and management. Whether it be a store employee who wants to update the times that they are available to work, check on accrual balances, make vacation requests or trade shifts with a co-workers, or a supervisor who is traveling and needs to approve time and schedule changes, self-service capabilities and the ease and flexibility provided by Web-based workforce management solutions improve working conditions and employee satisfaction, while lowering cycle times and costs.

Instituting a standardized method for time and attendance, demand forecasting, advanced scheduling and employee self-service across all retail store operations connects strategic planning at corporate headquarters and the individual needs of each retail store. By removing inconsistencies from store operations, retailers can provide a constant and reliable customer experience regardless of store location.

Unlike manual systems, Web-based workforce management solutions enable decision makers to improve operational efficiencies and reduce costs by simplifying the management and deployment of people. Take for example a large apparel retailer with more than 500 store locations. Manually scheduling part-time help in a single retail store can present its challenges but it becomes magnified when the process involves a robust network of stores located across diverse regions. The cost and time required to manually schedule employees in each location often proves to be cumbersome and costly when each store is responsible for scheduling employees, capturing employee time worked and then manually entering the data into a payroll system. The resulting inefficiencies can negatively impact customer interaction and satisfaction when management is focused on administrative tasks in the back office rather than serving customers needs up front. The impact at a corporate level is a lack of insight into labor costs, trends and other requirements impacting the bottom line.

A Web-based workforce management solution allows retailers to automate all aspects of employee scheduling and time and attendance. These core features, along with demand forecasting capabilities assure the retailer that the proper mix of staff is available to meet fluctuations in consumer demand. The infrastructure and technical architecture of Web-based workforce management solutions also offer added benefits of system scalability and interoperability. This allows time and labor information collected to then be audited and easily shared with other business-critical systems including payroll, point-of-sale solutions, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Regional managers and corporate headquarters gain visibility into daily operations by retrieving real-time data on employee time, schedules, vacation balances and overtime worked for better decision making and overall efficiency gains.

A Web-based workforce management system can improve operational efficiency, streamline employee scheduling, enhance analytical and reporting capabilities and convert data into actionable information. Integrated reporting and analytic capabilities make it easy for major retailers to identify the business drivers and performance indicators having the greatest impact on operational efficiency, helping establish best practices for improved productivity and service levels. For example, supervisors can more efficiently deploy properly skilled staff by analyzing detailed information on the type of employee needed to staff a given shift, while taking into consideration union rules, overtime parameters and budget constraints. At the end of the day, this approach enables the retailer to reduce labor costs and provide optimal customer service levels.

Solutions that offer a single portal user interface for all interactions with the system eliminate training costs and help employees quickly adapt to the software suite for immediate return on investment. The single-user interface permits users to execute all activities without leaving a single screen, increasing employee satisfaction and productivity. Screens are presented to the user based on their role and responsibility within the organization as well as their security profile. The single-user interface helps organizations achieve a standard look and feel for employee interaction with the system and its various applications.

Advanced scheduling capabilities and employee self-service features and functionality provided by workforce management solutions ensure schedules are prepared in accordance with employee work/life preferences. By providing employees, whether they are backroom clerks or in-store associates, with direct access to mission-critical information illustrating how individual employee objectives are tied to the corporate mission, employees are more empowered to deliver high-level and consistent service.

The collaboration and standardization achieved by an enterprise-wide workforce management solution helps retailers overcome inconsistent interactions between the customer and store employees, which can result in a loss of brand credibility, trust and sales.

By implementing a standardized workforce management system, retailers can create a uniform view of operations and optimize employee productivity. The efficiency gains achieved help retailers promote consistency throughout every store for improved customer in-store and overall experiences that serve to establishing profitable differentiation that drives sales.

Robert Farina is chief executive officer of CyberShift, a New Jersey-based provider of workforce management software and services focused on helping large, complex organizations optimize and manage the deployment of their people.

About CyberShift

CyberShift Inc. (www.cybershift.com) is a leading provider of workforce management software and services focused on helping large, complex organizations optimize and manage the deployment of their people. CyberShift's rules-based platform delivers a fully integrated solution for the management of all aspects of time and attendance, scheduling, self-service functions and workforce reporting and analytics. The enterprise-class workforce management suite reduces costs and improves processes for a variety of industries, including media and entertainment, retail, manufacturing, transportation, financial services, healthcare and the public sector. CyberShift is the workforce management solution provider of choice for more than 100 major organizations throughout the United States and Canada.

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