What to do when your retail employees are standing around and your store is not busy...
You probably don’t mind them taking a well-deserved break after a stressful customer or clearing their mind after finishing a task.
But there's a line between a break and just being lazy, and a good manager knows when it's been crossed. If you let them just wait for customers, the entire energy in your store will suffer.
You hope your sales team wants to keep busy but if they aren't willing to find constructive ways to fill extra time for their own employee development, then you have to assign tasks. Here's a caveat... These tasks shouldn’t be thought of as busy work as many of them can only happen when your store is empty.
It’s best to find ways for staff members to work together, but if you can’t do that because one needs to be in the storefront, both can still be busy, but busy separately.
The easiest thing to have employees do, and the thing that should always be done first, is to have them clean.
Keep reading if you feel everyone in your workplace knows how to clean.
Customers notice much more than employees, so be very specific in your instructions. (This is about half of the full list you can download for free.)
You can download the full 50 tips hereThe first group of actions are store cleaning tasks that tend to be forgotten and in some cases need to be done throughout the day, not just when you open:
Of course, once a customer comes in, all of this stops to greet the customer.
See also, 11 Ways Your Retail Employees Convert Buyers Into Lookers
In Sum
There are probably hundreds of tasks to give retail staff when it is slow that will help you when business picks up. That’s why you need to develop a specific list like this for your own store instead of using the old saw, “If you can lean you can clean.”
To increase your employee performance management skills, remember your employees are human beings who want to do work that is challenging and important so giving them time to develop and educate others on your team should be equally balanced with chores.
If you accomplish both of these things, you will find that you have a sales team with more of a sense of accomplishment and job satisfaction, which in turn improves morale, motivation, and retention.
Be specific and have fun with it – you’re paying them anyway so why not find ways to keep them engaged, learning and moving – not only sweeping and straightening.
Are you a hungry brick-and-mortar store owner who’s ready for a fresh, people-obsessed strategy? This training is for you if you want to grow your business using a powerful customer experience formula proven to make your cash register chirp.