The retail food and beverage sector has been through enormous change.

The biggest challenges are the skills shortage and high turnover rates. Low wages, strenuous workloads, border closures, and pandemic concerns have led to what many are calling the “Great Resignation.”

Businesses struggle to recruit and retain quality talent. Employees who remain in the industry can dictate when and how they work.

In a recent survey, 27% of retail leaders said turnover was their biggest challenge, with 37% of retail workers saying they want to quit their jobs due to poor management, pay, benefits and communication.

The onboarding process in retail food and beverage organizations is typically brief. New staff start work with minimal training or onboarding. This negatively impacts their initial experience. It also affects senior staff expected to provide training and support for new hires while still doing their other work.

Employers need to manage payroll and time/attendance of a workforce that includes varying roles, levels of seniority, contracts, and terms. Managing vacation requests can be complex. It’s common for retail employees to request pay advances or other special payroll considerations.

Retail organizations usually offer limited devices in-store for employees to record their time and attendance. Any employee self-service apps must be simple to run on these devices.

Organizations that focus on the employee experience will attract and retain workers better than organizations that don’t.

Poor employee experiences translate into 230 million+ days of lost productivity and $19 billion in recruiting, hiring, and training.

So, how to improve things?

1. Start with Listening and a Responsive strategy

More than simply surveying employees, you must act on their responses to ensure continued loyalty and engagement.

Begin by using Qualtrics to understand employee and candidate experiences. Rizing’s Employee Experience Insights (EXI) uses Qualtrics to listen to your employees’ experiences at the moment of impact with SAP SuccessFactors® to seamlessly provide data points and data analysis of how your people and your organization perform.

Then we go one step deeper to understand the results and create an action plan to move you forward. That’s where positive change happens and commitment to your organization grows.

2. Digitize Payroll and Time/Attendance

Employees get frustrated when their employer gets their paycheck wrong or when the tools for recording time and attendance don’t work.

Without digital tools, inefficiencies creep in and negatively impact the employee experience. Frequent issues with pay cause workers to seek employment elsewhere.

A digital solution for payroll and time/attendance allows employers to streamline processes, fine-tune scheduling, unlock efficiencies, and improve the experience for their people.

3. Deliver End-to-end Employee Experiences

For employees to remain loyal, they need their needs met at every stage of the employment lifecycle.

Without sophisticated digital HR tools, it’s easy to overlook employee concerns. Many HR solutions serve as simple filing cabinets for records and don’t provide any broader insights.

Your HR software should offer a central view of your retail food and beverage workers, with support for:

  • Qualifications and certifications
  • Personal data
  • Time off
  • Payroll data
  • Full employee lifecycle process

The system should also help digitize your processes to be more efficient and legally compliant.

First impressions matter. A positive employee experience doesn’t start on an employee’s first day – it includes everything up to that point.

The hiring process can be fast when an employee joins a retail food and beverage company. HR requires a lot of manual paperwork. Getting onboarded into payroll, scheduling, and rostering can be slow. This frustrates employees.

Investing in a digital solution to automate this process pays dividends in the quality of the onboarding experience.

4. Enable Self-Service

Employees expect to have self-service tools for recording their time, submitting a leave request, viewing a payslip, etc.

Manually submitting these requests is slow and frustrating. In a retail food and beverage environment, users often share HR self-service devices. Any technology needs to be logical, fast, and easy to use.

Sephora Gets a Digital Makeover

Rizing worked with beauty retailer Sephora to digitize their HR, onboarding, and employee experience. They were relying on paper-based processes and disparate, on-premise solutions. This placed a heavy administrative burden on store managers, requiring them to leave the shop floor to use a central computer to access employee details.

Rizing implemented MySephoraCareer, including multiple solutions from the SAP® SuccessFactors Human Experience Management Suite and the SAP SuccessFactors Mobile App.

This new solution serves as a one-stop-shop for HR processes and provides a master repository for all employee data. It has reduced administration time for managers and dramatically improved Sephora’s employee experience.

The company now enjoys continuous performance management and digital review processes. Users are more satisfied and more efficient.

Improving Employee Productivity and Efficiency for Sobeys

Sobeys Inc. is one of two national grocery chains in Canada. They wanted to improve employee efficiency to fuel competitive growth. The grocer needed an integrated human resources solution to automate HR processes and provide self-service abilities to employees.

By choosing Rizing and SAP® SuccessFactors, Sobeys integrated HR processes with core business solutions and improved internal processes. They now deliver a more engaging experience to their 90,000+ employees.

SAP SuccessFactors is crucial in helping Sobeys achieve employee management and growth goals.