Viva People Science Industry Trends: Retail

by Contributed | Jan 18, 2024 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Welcome to the fourth edition of Microsoft Viva People Science industry trends, where the Viva People Science team share learnings from customers across a range of different industries. Drawing on data spanning over 150 countries, 10 million employees, and millions of survey comments, we uncover the unique employee experience challenges and best practices for each industry. 

In this blog, @Jamie_Cunningham and I share our insights on the state of employee engagement in the retail industry. You can also access the recording from our recent live webinar, where we discussed this topic in depth.  

Let’s first look at what’s impacting the retail industry today. In summary, we are hearing about market volatility, supply chain constraints, changing consumer behavior, technological advancements, labor pressures, and rising costs. According to the Deloitte Retail Trends 2023 report, the top-of-mind issues for retail leaders are: 

• Growth versus sustainability: Retailers need to balance the short-term pressures of profitability and cash flow with the long-term goals of environmental and social responsibility. 


• Consumer confidence and retail sales: Retailers need to cope with the uncertain and volatile consumer demand, which is influenced by factors such as inflation, health concerns, and government policies. 


• Leadership quality and brand strength: Retailers need to demonstrate strong and visionary leadership, as well as to build and maintain a distinctive and trusted brand identity. 


• Technological innovation: Retailers need to leverage technology and data to create personalized, seamless, and omnichannel customer experiences, as well as to optimize their operations and supply chains. 

These issues require retailers to be agile, resilient, and innovative in their employee experience strategies and execution. The retail industry also faces some specific challenges in attracting and retaining talent, such as: 

• Rewards: Retail jobs often pay comparatively lower wages and benefits to other industries and can lack recognition and rewards for employees’ hard work.  


• Wellbeing: Retail employees often deal with high-stress, low-flexibility, and high-risk work environments, which can affect their physical and mental health. 


• Growth: Retail employees often perceive limited opportunities for career advancement, skill development, and learning, which can lead to disengagement and attrition. 

According to Glint benchmark data (2023), employee engagement in retail has declined by two points between 2021 and 2022. It’s clear that retailers need to invest in improving the employee experience, especially for the frontline workers, who are the face of the brand and the key to customer loyalty. So, how do they do this? Here are three examples of how retailers we’ve worked with have addressed the needs of their employees with the support of Microsoft Viva: 

1. Create a compelling future 

We worked with the leadership team of a MENA (Middle East and North Africa) based retailer to recognize that there was a connection between their ability to communicate the future of the direction of the organization effectively, and the degree to which employees saw a future for themselves in the organization. The team committed to clarifying how the business initiatives they were rolling out connected to future work opportunities for their teams. 

2. Build bridges with frontline employees 

According to the Microsoft Work Trend Report (2022), sixty-three percent of all frontline workers say messages from leadership don’t make it to them. A global fashion brand recognised after several years of employee listening that the actions being taken by leadership were not being felt on the shop floor. We worked with them to adopt a simplified action taking model with one clear commitment from leaders, that was efficient and effective in terms of communication and adoption. They also increased their investment in manager enablement to support better conversations within teams, when results from Viva Glint were released. This simplified approach led to improved perceptions of the listening process, and greater clarity at all levels on where to focus for a positive employee experience. 

3. One internal team, one goal 

Through an Executive Consultation with leaders of a UK retailer, it was identified that wellbeing was a risk for the business that unless addressed, would severely impact their priorities. With that in mind, the team created internal alignment – to prioritise wellbeing through both training investment and policy changes, resulting in a thirteen-point improvement in the wellbeing score year over year. 

Conclusions 

To succeed in this dynamic and competitive market, retailers need to focus on their most valuable asset: their employees. By investing in the employee experience, especially for the frontline workers, retailers can boost their employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and business performance. 

A downloadable one-page summary is also available with this blog for you to share with your colleagues and leaders. 

Leave a comment below to let us know if this resonates with what you are seeing with your employees in this industry. 

References: 

Deloitte retail trends report (2023) 

Microsoft Work Trend Index special report (2022) 

Forms practice mode is here to enhance your learning process

by Contributed | Jan 17, 2024 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Practice mode is now available in Forms. It’s tailored for EDU users, particularly students, offering a new way for students to review, test, and reinforce their knowledge. Follow me, let’s check out more details of practice mode. You can just try it from this template. (Note: Practice mode is only available for quizzes. ) 

Practice mode

Instant feedback after answering each question
In practice mode, questions will be shown one at a time. Students will receive immediate feedback after submitting each question, indicating whether their answer is right or wrong.

Instant feedback after answering each question

Try multiple times for the correct answer
Students can reconsider and try a question multiple times if they answer it incorrectly, facilitating immediate re-learning, and consequently strengthening their grasp of certain knowledge.

Try multiple times to get the correct answer

Encouragement and autonomy during practice
Students will receive an encouraging message after answering a question, whether their answer is correct or not, giving them a positive practice experience. And They have the freedom to learn at their own pace. If they answer a question incorrectly, they can choose to retry, view the correct answer, or skip this question.

Encouragement message and other options

Recap questions
After completing the practice, students can review all the questions along with the correct answers, offering a comprehensive overview to assess their overall performance.

Recap questions

Enter practice mode
Practice mode is only available for quizzes. You can turn it on from the “…” icon in the upper-right corner. Once you distribute the quiz recipients will automatically enter practice mode. Try out practice mode from this template now!

Enter practice mode

Understand Microsoft Shifts settings as an end-user

by Contributed | Jan 16, 2024 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Frontline managers have gained greater control, on a team-level, over the capabilities offered in Microsoft Shifts.

With the latest releases now available on the Shifts settings page, we have made updates to improve the end-user experience for frontline manager and workers. The updates are as follows:

Open shifts

Previously, when the Open Shifts setting was off, frontline managers could create but not publish open shifts. Also, they could view open and assigned shifts listed on their team’s schedule (including when workers are scheduled for time off).

Now, when the setting is turned off, frontline managers can’t create open shifts and can only view on their team’s schedule the assigned shifts (including scheduled time off).

See the differences from the past and new experience for frontline managers:

Time-off requests

Previously, when the time-off request setting was turned off, frontline managers couldn’t assign time off to their team members; more over, frontline workers couldn’t request time-off.

Now, when the setting is turned off, frontline managers can continue to assign time off to their team members. However, frontline workers will not have the ability to create time-off requests if this setting remains off.

Your organization can leverage Shifts as the place where the frontline may view their working and non-working schedules despite not using Shifts as your leave management tool.

See the new experience for frontline managers:

Open shifts, swap shifts, offer shifts and time-Off requests

Previously, when any of the request-related setting toggled between on to off, frontline managers couldn’t manage previous requests that were submitted when the setting was on.

Now, frontline managers can directly manage previous requests on the Requests page while frontline workers can view status and details of their individual requests.

Read more about

Shifts settings: Manage settings in Shifts – Microsoft Support
Latest Shifts enhancements: Discover the latest enhancements in Microsoft Shifts – Microsoft Community Hub