One of the benefits of interviewing potential new employees is finding out a bit about their previous jobs.  If they’ve worked in retail, we often learn something about how their last employer handled issues such as scheduling, job duties and pay rates.  These topics come up because they are frequently among the reasons that the employee quit.

Take last week’s applicant, who has worked for a major book store chain for some 15 years.  Because she’s been given a modest raise every year, she now makes much more than the new hires.  The store’s solution to cutting payroll costs is to schedule her for as few hours as possible, which is why she is looking for a different job — despite the years of experience that she has to offer customers shopping in that store. She can’t survive on 8 hours of work a week, even at her high pay rate.

Other applicants tell us that their previous retail job did not offer a fixed schedule from week to week, so they would not know if they would have income from 6 or 30 hours of work.  No one can live on a budget that uncertain.  This may be convenient and efficient for the store manager, but it does not work for the employee.

These two issues require different solutions in order to keep staff satisfied. The first applicant was unfortunately “raised” right out of a job, which is why it may be wise to have a salary cap in each category (i.e. part-time, full-time, sales, housekeeping).  This may not be popular, because everyone likes getting regular raises. But we have a part-time employee who has been with us over 30 years now. If she’d gotten a 25¢ raise per year, she’d now be making much more than our full-time managers.

The solution to the second issue is to offer a regular schedule from week to week so that employees can build a life around it — not just in terms of budget, but also when it comes to other activities such as classes, second jobs, child care and volunteer work. 

We know that no one wants to work every weekend, so in order to increase staff satisfaction we have an “A” week and “B” week schedule, with almost everyone working every other weekend. Retail work almost always includes weekends, and working every weekend is a common source of burnout among retail employees.

And what happens when someone can’t work their shift? They add their name to the “sub” list, and another employee is given a small incentive to fill in for them. The value that we place on staff members taking a “sub” shift for someone else shows that we appreciate the importance of activities outside the store.  But we realize that content and enthusiastic staff members provide excellent customer service when they are at work, and that’s important to us.

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder