Re-bonding manpower

Corporates like Reliance went on downsizing, showcasing the cautious approach. However, with retailers now moving to tier II and tier III cities along with the entry of pocket friendly foreign labels, there is a big hope for rise in job in the organised retail sector.

Retention and attrition

According to Mr K Pandia Rajan, CEO, Ma Foi Randstad (India and Sri Lanka), “Retention has been a bigger challenge for the sales and service staff in retail industry. The organised form of the industry is at a relatively nascent stage, the trained talent pool available is limited, and many retail players look at hiring from competitor. Many a times, organisations do not invest time and effort to develop proposition of an employer brand.”

The other major problem that the retail sector has been facing for long is the high attrition rate. Mr Nihar Ranjan Ghosh, Senior Vice President - HR, Spencer’s Retail Limited says, “The industry attrition rate for frontline staff is around 35 - 40 per cent. The biggest reason for high attrition at the frontline is that the staff looks at this employment as a job and not as a career. Also, a little bit more of the fringe benefits, from another retailer or from a prospective employer from another industry, would lure the frontline staff away”. 

The talent factor

Today, for many retailers, the dearth of talent situation is a big crisis, which has been with them for quite a long time. The companies face a stiff and a long term challenge of a dwindling supply of qualified talent with the knowledge and experience to perform the critical and increasingly complex tasks, which are necessary to attain and sustain high performance. Rajan opines “We have many institutes spread across the country. However, we do not have a world-class full-spectrum institutes focused on retail as an industry.”

Need for strengthening bond

You pay X amount of money to your highly trained workforce. Your rival is more than happy to pay Z amount of remuneration to get that trained workforce into their team. This is a complicated cycle and how to get over it? What else employers can do apart from monetary increment to enhance the employee satisfaction? To this Mr Ghosh’s suggestion is - “The only way to address this is to take several initiatives, which would create career pathway for the youngsters who join this industry. Special training programmes, which can gear them up for higher positions, company-funded skill enhancement programmes, which would enable horizontal and vertical movement with respect to the corporate ladder, might enable a better buy-in of retail as a career option for many, who currently don’t perceive this as so”.

Just taking care of the employees’ professional aspects may not suffice; new HR initiatives should also focus on softer aspects like the quality needs, customer-orientation, productivity and stress, team work and leadership building.