How Retailers Can Solve Workforce Challenges

Retailers are facing a major conundrum: consumers are flocking back to brick-and-mortar retail while the struggle to adequately staff stores has never been greater.

High turnover in retail isn’t new. According to McKinsey & Company, annual employee turnover among frontline retail workers has been at least 60 percent for a long time. But record inflation and a global pandemic exacerbated the problem. We’re now in a period that the consulting firm dubbed “The Great Attrition,” where the quit rate in U.S. retail and hospitality outpaces the overall national quit rate by more than 70 percent.

This workforce crisis is particularly ill-timed. After a period of prolonged isolation during the height of the pandemic, consumers ran back to physical stores, craving physical connections with the brands they love. According to the National Retail Federation, a record 197 million consumers shopped over the five-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 2022 and more than a third of these were in-store shoppers, a 17 percent increase from 2021 (while online shopping saw only a 2 percent year-over-year increase during this same period).

The early-pandemic proclamations of the death of brick-and-mortar retail have quickly proven to be premature. In fact, some may say that we’re living in a renaissance of physical shopping, where in-store experiences are evolving to meet new consumer shopping patterns. The most forward-thinking brands are catering to the omnichannel shopper in unique ways, such as making buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) incredibly intuitive, offering individualized in-store experiences like personal shopping appointments, or turning their physical retail spaces into showrooms — optimizing for brand immersion rather than sales.

After years of becoming accustomed to the comforts of e-commerce — e.g., personalization, convenience, and speed — consumers now enter physical stores with heightened expectations. But how can retailers deliver high-touch experiences with an unhappy workforce that’s dwindling daily?

To help find answers, Waitwhile conducted a national survey of 1,000 frontline retail workers to examine the key factors behind employee happiness and to surface critical insights for retail organizations that would reduce worker turnover and improve customer satisfaction.

Here’s some of what we found.

Nearly one in two frontline retail workers are apathetic or unhappy at work. Source: Waitwhile

Only a little more than half of the workers Waitwhile surveyed indicated that they were happy with their jobs. This finding shouldn’t come as a surprise given the high turnover rate in the industry, but the fact that just about one in two frontline retail workers are actively unhappy or apathetic should be cause for concern.

A 2019 Oxford University Business School study found that happy workers are 13 percent more productive and a 2022 Gallup poll found that business units with engaged workers have 23 percent higher profit. Widespread unhappiness amongst the retail workforce is surely contributing to staffing challenges, but also likely actively undermining key business goals.

Our study also found that nearly 40 percent of retail workers are anxious at work. Among anxious frontline workers, we found that meeting customer satisfaction goals was the top contributor to work-related stress — ranked higher than sales targets, multitasking, and scheduling-related stressors like long hours or last-minute changes.

Seventy percent of retail workers regularly deal with angry customers. Source: Waitwhile

Retail workers’ emotional well-being is further exacerbated by rising rates of consumer incivility. Our research found that 68.5 percent of retail workers need to regularly grapple with angry or frustrated customers, and that one in five have to deal with these tense situations on a daily basis.

When asked to identify the main cause of customer frustration, the retail workers we surveyed indicated that long wait times were the top issue. This confirms findings from Waitwhile’s 2022 consumer survey, which found that people encounter lines more in retail than any other industry and that 75 percent of consumers feel bored, annoyed, frustrated or impatient when they have to wait in line.

Research has shown that consistent exposure to incivility takes a mental and physical toll, leading to job burnout and turnover. Retailers must find inventive queue management solutions to reduce wait times or completely eliminate lines in order to improve their customer experience and, as a result, employee happiness.

Nearly one in two retail workers want more automation. Source: Waitwhile

Technology has already been identified as a key tool that retailers can use to combat worker shortages with more efficient operations. Our study found that workers are incredibly receptive to this proposition. In fact, almost 50 percent actively want more automation.

Our research also found that retail employees are regularly burdened by outdated or poorly designed tech and that 54 percent wish that their company invested more in maintaining, improving or expanding the technology they have to use at work.

Finding the Right Tech

2023 is a critical year for retailers, most of which must work through a labor shortage while expectations from consumers continue to climb. The brands that end up winning consumers’ hearts will be those that reinvent the physical shopping experience to meet the needs of today’s cross-channel shopper. Key to this will be harnessing excellent tech solutions that bring much-needed efficiencies to workflows and subsequently improve employee satisfaction while crafting standout customer experiences.

To access all of the findings from Waitwhile’s Employee Sentiment Report: Retail (2023) and to grab a free copy of the report, click here.

Christoffer Klemming is the CEO and co-founder of Waitwhile, a cloud-based solution that any retailer can use to create the perfect end-to-end customer flows with virtual waitlists, appointments, messaging, and analytics.