Connect with a banker
Let us partner with you. Reach out to a business banker for assistance.
Explore our banking solutions
Find the right banking products for your business needs.
Utilize your POS as an employee management tool
Dec 18, 2024 | 5 minute read
Retail owners face tight margins and high labor costs. Data-driven decisions can help manage employees and staffing levels.
As the economy continues to adjust to inflation, transportation costs, and consumer expectations, retailers of all sizes are trying to control costs. Employees represent a major cost for many businesses but is often overlooked as an area of improvement. Small business owners may lack the information and the time to optimize staffing. Further, employers should also collaborate with staff to create a meaningful employee experience to help 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 game, allowing businesses of any size to collect and analyze data to make precise decisions about their operations. Combining this data with new automation tools 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
How you schedule your staff, 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 Rather than relying on outdated and manual processes for recording work hours and calculating payroll, you can use your POS system to digitize and improve these tasks, simultaneously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 calendar for your employees and appointment bookings for customers. By setting up this 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, while boosting business performance.
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 then use data to assess how they are performing compared to those benchmarks. Your POS system 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 system 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 if issues arise.
For example, tracking sales conversion rates 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 as well as the performance of your employees 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 system, 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 challenges of running a retail business are not going away any time soon. So make sure your staffing management tools set you up for success. From improving staffing levels to boosting employee performance, your POS system can be a critical tool for making operations more efficient and increasing cost savings over time.
Start of disclosure content