ONBOARDING NEW HIRES IN TIME FOR PEAK TRADE
Peak trade is only a matter of weeks away and given how tricky it has been (and still is!) to find staff, most retailers are well into recruiting for new team members to help over the busy Christmas period.
If you’ve already managed to secure your team, firstly – nice work! Secondly, what are you doing to effectively onboard them?
A great onboarding process is the best opportunity to reassure your new employees that they’ve made the right decision in joining your business. And in today’s labour market, this is more critical than ever! After doing the hard work to recruit them, the last thing you want is to have them leave in their first few weeks because they weren’t setup for success. Candidates know that they have options and that there are plenty of retail brands vying for them to join their teams so creating a great first impression really counts.
Your onboarding process tells a new employee a lot about your business. It shows them how much they’ll be valued and supported in their role and it demonstrates the things that really matter to your brand.
Often the first things that Managers launch into when onboarding their newbies are all the operational bits and bobs – you know, POS, how to use the time and attendance system, stock processes, etc. Although these are important and will definitely need to be covered off early on, we’d suggest a slightly different approach.
Start by letting your newbies know what you want to be famous for when it comes to customer experience and how you bring this to life for your customers. At School of Retail, we call this our ‘North Star’ and it provides the direction for everything that your retail teams should do to be successful.
As someone wise once told us, ‘start as you wish to proceed’. By starting the onboarding process by understanding the vision for your customer, you’re more likely to create a culture and team that is genuinely about helping the customer.
So how do you do this exactly?
1. Explain to them how you want your customers to feel when they shop with you, and what you want to be famous for when it comes to customer experience;
2. Get them to tell you all the things they could do to bring this to life for customers, every single time;
3. Highlight and reinforce the positive behaviours you see that represent what you want your store to be famous for because what gets recognized gets repeated.
We think this is a surefire way to help your newbies really understand the main purpose of their role and the reason they’ve been hired - to help ensure that customers have a great experience in-store.
All of our programs at the School of Retail kick off with a class all about the Customer where we help managers articulate their customer experience ‘North Star’.