Evolving Training For The Retail Workforce
In the new world, which is still emerging from the pandemic, the skills required for work have changed. Employees need to be smart and need to be aware of how to operate in the new reality. They need to understand the processes required to perform better.
There are a few challenges that retailers are facing.
Retailers' Challenge
How to handle competition and better manage infrastructure, supply chain, and compliance?
Retailers' Needs
How to better manage warehouse, distribution and logistics, tools and technologies, processes, compliance, eCommerce, automation, and equipping people optimally through training?
Focal Areas Of The Retail Industry
What should retail training focus on?
- Performing tasks efficiently and effectively: Focus on getting the first time right, every time.
- Using the latest technology well: Be it billing, stocking, or store management!
- Understanding the product: Good understanding of the service or product learners provide/sell.
- Managing your image: Appropriate grooming and personal hygiene are important.
- Improving soft skills: Communication, body language, interpersonal skills, and other skills.
Retail employees now have to manage new events and situations which they have never seen before. Employees need to be clued up on the latest updates on compliance, product knowledge, handling customers and processes, or it could be the best practices, too.
Training once a month or quarter just won't work. Ideally, employees need to be trained on a product, service, concept, strategy, plan, etc., on a daily basis. However, getting employees to learn daily is easier said than done.
What do we keep missing in the training programs? It's simply the fact that "learners are unable to remember and apply the learning on the job!"
Employees mostly desist from training as it interrupts their daily work or tasks. They often complain of a lack of time or energy to attend overly long sessions.
Another factor is the forgetting curve. Learners are unable to remember even 10–15% of what they learned during a training session. That makes it doubly hard for the trainers to come up with an effective solution.
These days, they are not keen to take time out of their regular tasks and attend sessions that may not be of value for the time spent.
Solution
The solution is to provide effective point-of-need performance support to the retail workforce. The performance of staff needs to be consistent, and they cannot afford to forget crucial information.
Effective point-of-need performance support is required for all the staff members to perform better.
The focus must be on modular training to enable staff prior to the store opening or after the store closing, rather than losing time in between.
The idea is to provide point-of-need performance support, which can be:
- Easily implemented across geographies
- Effortlessly accessible to every employee
The point-of-need performance support:
- Drives better adoption
- Uses role-plays and scenarios
- Provides a continuous learning experience aligned to their workflow
Continuous learning journeys are going to be even more critical than ever before. This is not just from an industry standpoint but also in the areas of digital skills, company culture/ethics/ethos, soft skills, clarity of job role, and compliance.
For seamless alignment of learning to the flow of work, you should understand how learners consume information and drive the required/curated content in the easiest form.
Conclusion
To conclude, we need to look at newer ways of training, as well as enable the learners with point-of-need support. LMSs and LXPs should be used to drive continuous learning and to provide learning in the flow of work for better learning outcomes that lead to better performance at work.
At Tesseract Learning, our learning and visual architects constantly innovate and reinvent their approaches to design, develop, and deliver effective L&D programs. We are leveraging our powerful learning platform, KREDO, to create efficiencies across the training life cycle and deliver exceptional learning experiences.
Contact me or leave a comment below to learn more about our services and how we can help you.