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THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT ON THE RETAIL BOTTOM LINEMOVING TOWARDS ORGANISATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS

QUESTBACK GUIDE 2017www.questback.com

THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT ON THE RETAIL BOTTOM LINE

To succeed in this challenging environment, retail CEOs need to build agile, flexible organisational structures that unlock innovation in order to remain one step ahead of the competition. As the velocity of change increases, they must also embrace technology and processes that enable them to actively listen to their employees and use this insight to fuel change. This enables organisations to improve engagement, boost productivity, drive up retention and support better decision making. All of which works to make the organisation more effective, more customer-focused and builds a high performing culture.

To some retailers, the topic of employee feedback can be daunting. With thousands of employees in hundreds of locations, moving away from the status quo may seem like a major challenge – companies can feel they don’t have the skills or experience to embed employee insight within their organisational structure. However, the benefits to the business outweigh any objections and with the right partner it can be an easier programme to run than you might expect. For retailers, what is important is to move gradually up the employee insight maturity curve, at a pace that fits your needs, working with an experienced, knowledgeable partner to deliver business transformation while maximising your available resources.

This guide provides an introduction for retailers to the benefits of transforming your employee feedback programme to drive strategic change, and outlines what you should look for when choosing a partner to assist you on the journey.

Retailers are living in a new era - one that combines uncertainty with constant change. Consumer expectations are growing, while competition to attract and retain the best staff is rising. Digital transformation is lowering barriers to entry, intensifying competition while economic pressures caused by Brexit, rising inflation and increases in the National Living Wage all impact the bottom line. To survive and thrive, your retail organisation must be agile, flexible and innovative. Listening to your best assets - your people - and acting on their insight is at the heart of delivering organisational effectiveness, improved customer experience and business success.


MOVING UP THE EMPLOYEE INSIGHT MATURITY CURVE

1. The annual employee survey has become the core focus of feedback collection for many retailers. It sucks up a large slice of budget and time, particularly when having to reach geographically dispersed, shift-based workforces, leaving few resources for anything else.

2. Many retailers lack confidence in their ability to manage feedback and engagement projects in-house, choosing instead to rely too heavily on external consultants.

3. Retailers are often forced to take a short-term tactical view because of the impact of the annual budget cycle. They are too focused on running one-off projects rather than working towards the longer term strategic gains that can be delivered by implementing a single integrated feedback platform, that they own.

In increasingly competitive markets, retailers understand the value of employee feedback to business success. However, there are three main obstacles that stop them making the most of the employee feedback opportunity:

Before you incorporate employee feedback into your retail organisation, it’s important to bear in mind that you can work in stages, moving up the employee insight maturity curve, through four separate steps:

THE 4 STEPS ON THE EMPLOYEE INSIGHT MATURITY CURVE


This stage is where many retailers currently find themselves. They typically run a single, annual, anonymous survey across the entire workforce. Data from this exercise is not integrated with information from other feedback (such as exit interviews or performance reviews), but sits in a silo on its own, limiting its effectiveness. There is no way of following up individual concerns, and the overall focus is on gaining feedback that will drive tactical improvements. Often these annual surveys are still paper-based, making their setup, collection and analysis time consuming, particularly for retailers with hundreds of shops across the country. Overall, the results are backward looking, rather than focusing on what is happening now.

The final stage of the Employee Insight Maturity Curve completes the move from reactive to proactive. Across the entire retailer, decisions are driven by a deep understanding of the drivers behind employee behaviour, enabling businesses to accurately spot trends and opportunities and take immediate action to benefit from them. The combination of a mobilised workforce and continuous feedback and knowledge drives a transformational, sustained performance improvement that feeds directly into an enhanced experience for customers.

1. SATISFIED

4. AHEAD

This stage involves embracing the collection of event-driven feedback around specific occurrences within the employee journey. These could include onboarding new joiners, collecting feedback from training sessions or from those returning to work after leave. Importantly, there is a closer, clearer link between the feedback provided and the follow-up actions taken. This makes it obvious to retail employees that their views make a difference, and that they are being listened to. Feedback is handled much more holistically, with comparisons able to be made between stores and regions within a wider group.

2. ENGAGED

By the end of the second stage employee voice is embedded within business processes, and the feedback staff provide is helping to drive improvements. The next step is to make feedback a central part of retail operations and create a two way, constant dialogue that benefits the organisation and empowers staff. In addition to event-driven feedback, feedback is ‘always on’, with staff able to provide their views however and whenever they want, confident that their voice will be heard and action taken. Mobilised retailers have a real-time understanding of what is happening within their workforces, however large and dispersed they may be, and use this information to guide their strategy.

3. MOBILISED


In our experience of working with retailers it is possible to become self-sufficient in the way you manage and use feedback in around three years, without requiring additional internal resource. Here’s a potential roadmap for a typical journey towards feedback self-sufficiency:

YEAR ONE:Work with an expert partner to implement a central technology platform, and then let them manage your existing annual survey on it. You’ll find the process is more efficient and produces time and cost savings, with results available faster. The platform can also be used for other feedback initiatives such as communities, touchpoint-based feedback and surveys. All your data and insight resides in a single place from where it can be easily analysed and shared across the organisation, both via traditional reports and integrated online dashboards tailored to the needs of individual managers.

YEAR TWO:Over the course of the year, strengthen your existing in-house team’s skills around managing and maximising feedback through knowledge transfer from the partner. This will give you better control of feedback strategy and tactics, enabling you to begin empowering managers, such as at a regional or store level, to run their own initiatives, through a simple to use, intuitive platform. Responsibilities can be split equally between the partner and the internal team, with the partner offering advice and support where required.

YEAR THREE:After progressing up the employee insight maturity curve, the retailer leads all feedback initiatives, including running the annual survey, without requiring additional internal resource. Only minimal support is required from the partner - to overcome anonymity concerns for instance. The retailer is in full control of the central feedback platform which is being used throughout the organisation to run surveys of all types. A feedback centre of excellence plans and co-ordinates activities, providing advice and best practice on maximising the effectiveness of employee insight.

MOVING TO FEEDBACK SELF-SUFFICIENCY


A retailer that has progressed to feedback self-sufficiency is in complete control of its employee insight strategy, owns rather than outsources its data, and has the skills and flexibility that allows it to do what it wants, when it wants. Costs are lower, with no external consultancy fees, leading to a greater return on investment for feedback. The wider range of feedback types (from communities to always-on insights), drives improved response rates and greater engagement. Feedback becomes central to the retailer, with the entire company empowered to gather, use and benefit from the insights it delivers, within standard corporate guidelines. Faster analysis and powerful dashboard-based reporting dramatically reduces the time between feedback collection and meaningful results, allowing quicker, more informed management decisions. Dashboards can be easily tailored to serve the precise insight requirements of individual teams and managers and to combine feedback with other data sources, including customer and business information to give a holistic, actionable picture. Employee and customer feedback becomes more valuable and meaningful because it can be integrated directly with business metrics.

WHY SELF-SUFFICIENCY PAYS

CHOOSING THE RIGHT PARTNER FOR YOUR FEEDBACK JOURNEY

While it is possible to move up the feedback employee insight maturity curve on your own, working with an experienced partner will help you overcome challenges, maximise the business impact of your insight programme and build a strong foundation for an open, collaborative feedback culture across your organisation, all without requiring additional internal resource. As well as the ability to support your current annual survey programme, there are 7 key considerations when deciding on your new employee feedback partner:

1. CONSIDER CUSTOMISATION AND COMPLEXITYThink about the degree of customisation you will need from your feedback platform as well as how complex the reporting hierarchies will be. There are many stand-alone feedback collection solutions and apps that might look tempting and cost effective, but will not be fit for purpose over the long term - be sure to identify a robust, scalable system that is built to handle complexity, can be tailored to your needs and handles the full range of feedback types securely and easily.

2. TAKE A LONGER TERM PERSPECTIVE The right partner should to be able to support you over time and at a pace that is right for you. You should create a 3-5 year plan of how your engagement programme is likely to evolve and your chosen supplier must be able to support you at each and every stage of this journey. They should be able to give you practical guidance and advice about turning your vision into a reality that works for you.


3. CONSIDER THE COMPLETE EMPLOYEE JOURNEYThe employee experience (and the feedback that individuals provide) will vary depending where they are in the employee journey; a new joiner, for example, will have specific insight about the recruitment and onboarding process. So your platform should allow you to gather insight at key touchpoints, from entry through to exit and alumni.

4. ASSESS THE LEVEL OF EXTERNAL SUPPORT YOU WILL WANT - NOW AND IN THE FUTUREYour plan will help you assess the level of responsibility your internal team can take for supporting the design and configuration of your data collection and reporting, now and in the future. Most retailers are unlikely to have all the knowledge and resources immediately available to manage without external help, but even fewer will want to continue spending large amounts on external consultancy support year after year. Look for a partner that can help you develop your internal capabilities so you can take greater responsibility for the programme over time.

5. INTEGRATE WITH BUSINESS METRICSThe purpose of gathering feedback is to drive business outcomes. Therefore your programme must be able to reflect your business priorities and strategic objectives. Choose a partner that can help you tailor feedback initiatives to what is important to you while integrating engagement data with your HR, customer and KPI metrics. Ideally, you should also be able to generate interactive dashboard-style reporting to bring all

these data sources together – giving leaders a holistic view of engagement and its impact on the business.

6. MAKE EASE OF USE A PRIORITYThe end user experience should always remain frictionless, simple and intuitive even as your engagement programme is getting more sophisticated. Adopt mobile-friendly solutions that provide a single point of entry for responding to surveys and providing feedback – these are particularly useful if a large percentage of your workforce does not have access to a PC in the course of their working day. Managers could have the opportunity to create their own surveys, discussions and communities, analyse results and identify follow-up actions. Reporting and analysis should clearly identify the key areas for attention from quantitative and qualitative data, to allow the sharing of best practice to enable real improvements. Results should be linked to action planning tools through the same online portal.

7. CHOOSE EXPERIENCENo matter how powerful your platform, technology alone is not enough to create an effective engagement strategy. Your partner should have the real, hands-on practical experience of helping retail organisations like yours transform their employee feedback programmes. They should be able to help you communicate your objectives to key stakeholders, as well as providing best practice advice to ensure you maximise value from your feedback and engagement strategy and drive cultural change.

The retail market is being transformed by greater competition, rising consumer expectations and the move to digital channels. If you want to survive and thrive, then your retail business needs to be agile, flexible and innovative. We believe listening to your people and acting on their insight is at the heart of delivering this organisational effectiveness and boosting customer loyalty. Progressing up the employee insight maturity curve towards organisational effectiveness can appear challenging, but if you take it step by step and work with the right external partner you can create a responsive, foresight-driven business that uses employee insight to drive long term success and underpins high performing cultures.

CONCLUSION

TO FIND OUT HOW QUESTBACK CAN HELP YOU ON YOUR FEEDBACK JOURNEY CONTACT US ON 0207 403 3900 OR SEND AN EMAIL TO [email protected]


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