I need a cost-effective way of ensuring my small stores have the right staffing hours and that we pay staff the correct amount. What are the options?

This is a challenge for many retailers with small stores. There is a common misconception that little can be done to impact staff costs as the store may already be running on minimum staffing levels, or there is the belief that there isn’t enough scope to reduce headcount. There are several options available to such operators, but the benefits that fuel a business case for change are different to those in larger stores.

Envision Retail managing director Jason Kemp says: “A labour hours model based on key workload drivers will enable you to set targets for store managers to hit each week. It will give you visibility centrally of the total hours needed to effectively operate the entire estate of stores, and individual store managers can be held accountable for hitting their targets.”

In larger stores, scheduling staff to meet the forecast levels of demand is the norm. For smaller stores, this simply may not be possible and it is therefore important to be able to move whatever tasks you can to better align the workload to the available people.

Kemp says a time and attendance system generates two types of benefits for retailers: “Firstly it reduces the level of manual processing conducted centrally, and secondly it also prevents staff cost leakage either from staff being paid for hours that they did not work, or even worse - and believe it or not we see this surprisingly frequently - by continuing to pay staff long after they left the business.”