Use your POS solution to help with employee management

Small retailers are often seeking to control operating expenses while also trying to create the best possible experiences for their customers and staff. Employees represent a major cost for many businesses but are often overlooked as an area of improvement beyond keeping timesheets. At the same time, employers should also collaborate with staff to create a meaningful employee experience and retain top talent. These may seem like difficult priorities to balance, but they don’t have to be.

Modern point-of-sale (POS) solutions completely change the calculus of these decisions – allowing businesses of any size to collect and analyze data to make precise decisions about their operations. Combining this data with the right integrations can help small businesses put these insights into action, make daily processes more efficient and boost employee satisfaction – quickly and easily.

Employee management is more than tracking hours

When you schedule staff to work, when they punch in, and how they are compensated for retail performance is critical to your business success. Rather than relying on outdated and manual processes for recording work hours and calculating payroll, you can use your POS solution to digitize and improve these tasks – simultaneously empowering your employees with transparent scheduling, clear performance targets, and data-driven compensation.

Consider these key areas for improvement:

1. Make the scheduling process easier for you and your employees.

Your point-of-sale software can integrate with numerous add-ons, like a shared schedule platform for your employees and appointment bookings for customers. By setting up a calendar integration, your staff can indicate their availability to work and make it easier for you to create a staffing schedule that meets your needs and theirs. This will help build employee engagement and job satisfaction, while reducing time spent negotiating shift coverage.

2. Create performance benchmarks for your business and individual employees.

No matter your business size, you should conduct periodic performance reviews* with employees to measure their success against your overall objectives. Clearly setting objectives for their personal and professional development – and measuring their performance on those objectives – will help you both be successful. However, good performance evaluation goes beyond individual behaviors and interactions – you should also set quantitative benchmarks for each role in your business – retail associates, cashiers, stockroom employees, etc. – and use data to assess how they are performing compared to those metrics. Your POS solution can be a valuable tool in this process, allowing you to track metrics like sales volumes, sales revenue, sales conversion rates, returns/refunds, and more. Meeting individually with each employee to discuss reasonable benchmarks and action plans will go a long way to encourage beneficial behaviors and time spent on important tasks – all while empowering employees to understand how and why they are being evaluated for their work.

3. Track employee performance with retail sales data.

Once you and your employees have defined and agreed upon data-driven benchmarks* for their performance, you can use your POS solution to build tracking dashboards. From sales activities to inventory management, this will give you a robust view of the daily retail activities in your business and give you the ability to make quick, precise decisions based on key performance indicators*.

For example, tracking sales conversion rate and sales per square foot can tell you how efficient your business is at turning window shoppers into purchasers and using your physical space to drive sales. How these metrics change over time – increasing or decreasing, quickly or slowly – can indicate the health of your retail business and help you decide how to make operational improvements.

4. Automate your payroll management and sales incentives.

With streamlined scheduling and employee performance tracking, you are set up for success to better manage your business’s payroll. You can integrate your POS system with your accounting and payroll software to ensure that pay calculations, time-off balances, and tax/government withholdings are accurate and timely.

Further, your new sales benchmarks and review processes could help you set up a sales incentive program or retail commission plan* for your employees. By closely tracking sales activities through your POS solution, you can accurately award additional compensation for employees who excel in their roles. This will help you incentivize beneficial behaviors and give your employees achievable rewards for their efforts.

The cost pressures of running a small retail business are not going away any time soon – make sure your staffing strategy and supporting tools set you up for success. From improving staffing levels to boosting employee performance, your POS solution can be a critical tool for increasing operational efficiency.

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