News

Retail workforce absence hinders employee engagement, claims report

December 28, 2018

Rampant unplanned retail store associate absence is detrimental to employee engagement, staff productivity, team morale and management stress, according to a Global Retail Absence survey, "What Came First: Retail Absenteeism or Low Engagement?"  issued by The Workforce Institute at Kronos and conducted with Coleman Parkes Research.

The issue is critical for retailers as 78 percent acknowledge employee engagement is key to organzational success and more than half agree that poor employee engagement causes increased absenteeism.

The study analyzed responses from 800 retail managers across Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S.

Other highlights include:

• Unplanned absence and poor engagement fuel chaos and drive turnover.
• Retailers worldwide estimate 7 percent of labor hours are scheduled but not worked, and many view unplanned absence as one of their organization’s most difficult, complex and time-consuming issues.
• Retail managers in the U.K. (63 percent), U.S. (63 percent), and Germany (61 percent) feel strongest that poor employee engagement has a big impact on unplanned employee absence.
• More than half of retailers worldwide (52 percent) see a direct correlation between poor employee engagement and increased staff turnover, with retailers in the U.S. (61 percent) and U.K. (55 percent) seeing the strongest connection.
• Retailers worldwide believe absenteeism has a big impact on customer satisfaction (47 percent) and store revenue (42 percent) – which are the top two metrics retailers said they used to measure productivity.
• Retailers recognize that a greater focus on work-life balance (62 percent) and workforce scheduling technology (59 percent) would have a positive impact on productivity.
• Globally, nearly half of all retailers (43 percent) are not using an automated solution to manage individual work preferences and availability.
• One-third of retail managers (34 percent) say managing shift-swap requests is one of the biggest workforce management challenges they face as an organization.
• France (59 percent) and the U.S. (53 percent) lead the way using shift-swap technology, but elsewhere adoption falls short – especially in the U.K. (44 percent) and Canada (40 percent).

Only 23 percent of retailers worldwide enable self-service shift swapping on a mobile device.

"When making allowances for unplanned employee absence by over-staffing or over-scheduling — as 88 percent of retailers worldwide do — you react to the problem rather than correcting it. This reactive nature creates unnecessary work for managers and poses a risk to customer satisfaction," said Joyce Maroney, executive director, The Workforce Institute at Kronos, in the release.