To all of our People Geeks working in retail - do you have any tips or advice for engaging with employees who are store based and typically harder to reach?

Engagement and Culture
#1

To all our People Geeks working in retail - what advice would you give to Retailers who have large populations of employees in store based roles when it comes to engaging with employees communicating results and empowering time poor managers with taking action on employee surveys?

#2

When employees aren’t office based — and often time limited — you should really put yourself in their shoes and think about how they’d typically consume information.

For example, posters are super effective if done in a creating way. They can carry headlines and bite-sized information and could even become a ‘meeting on a wall’ where Managers talk through what’s shown at the start of the day/start of a shift.

Obviously everyone’s on their smartphones, so if the business has an employee app (either of its own or something like Slack or Workplace) it’d be really constructive to use it to deliver insightful comms that’s easy to consume on the move. Could employees be given 5 minutes each day to log in and take a look, on company time?

And for time poor managers, keep it really simple and try to sell the benefits of taking part (eg, setting actions from the survey for example). What can comms provide to make this easier for them? Results that cut out the jargon and help them understand their action areas quickly and clearly? A suggestion box that employees can use? A set of pre-written talking points or suggestions on how to set the actions and ensure the local employees know what’s happening?

Those are just a couple of my thoughts, hope they’re useful!

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#3

Hi Jason,

Have you done any empathy research and to find out where your users (employees and managers) currently consume information or what is important to them? You could find that inviting them into the process and understanding what would work best with them (that is also feasible for your organization) could be really powerful. I had this conversation just yesterday with a company that is in the retail/spa space.

Let me know if you want some suggestion for creative activities you could facilitate to get some quick empathy research going. You can reach me at dorothy@coreisma.com

Dorothy

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