3 Reasons Retailers Should Care about Performance Engagement

The face of work is changing thanks to the concept of Performance Engagement. It’s the recombination of two ideas: engaging your employees and managing their performance. You can create a fun place to work without sacrificing productivity. Here’s how it works, and why you should care.

True performance engagement used to be prohibitively time consuming, the result of a dedicated store or shift manager who does nothing other than talk with team members, establishing clear lines of communication, setting goals, and shoring up weak areas in their performance.

That might work if you didn’t also have a store to run. But positions of leadership in retail never come without administrative duties, special customer interactions, and everything you can’t ask your employees to do yet.

But since we live in an age of instant data and constant connectivity, true performance engagement has finally become possible. Employees use incentivized apps on their own smartphones to track their own performance in sales, customer interactions, and even non-sales related tasks like stocking, upkeep, and training. They’re rewarded for these tasks with points that add up to fun kickbacks and positive digital feedback from peers.

Performance engagement offers some distinct benefits for managers.

1. It saves time.

You’d probably love to meet with each of your employees as often as possible, asking questions and offering encouragement. But you have too much administrative work to do. Performance engagement frees up time you normally spend on both. Not only can you keep an eye on each employee’s performance in real time, you get auto-generated sales reports, decluttering your administrative schedule.

The other bonus is that you don’t even have to be in any given store, making it perfect for franchise owners. You can’t be in every store at once, but your performance engagement app can.

2. Retention becomes easier.

A study by Willis Tower Watson found that 33% of employees leave their jobs in two years or less. As a retail manager, you know that this percentage is likely higher in your specific industry. Due to a national labor shortage, (which is quickly surging back after eased Covid restrictions), many employers are paying more and more to keep their talent— or poach it.

If your business can’t handle that expense right now, performance engagement is a great way to make your store a fun, motivational place to work. A place where your best people will want to stay.

3. Motivation comes built in.

Performance engagement offers the most complete strategy for motivating your employees. It is designed with a focus on fun, often laid out like a game, with employees scoring points throughout the day. So while you may spend a great deal of time and money trying to make your workplace fun with company activities, parties, snacks, and games in the break room, with performance engagement, the work itself becomes the game.

You’re in retail, so you know that many of your employees don’t have a lifetime goal of becoming the top phone salesman in the region. Many are likely younger, treating their jobs as stepping stones. Even if you’re considering some of them for promotion, you can’t expect to motivate each of them based on achievement alone. Even commission pay isn’t the most powerful motivation anymore. A 2017 Gallup poll found that only 15% of the world’s employees are “engaged,” and that includes sales jobs. Employees are looking for fun, innovation, peer recognition, and a sense of achievement. A performance engagement platform offers all of it.

Performance engagement solves so many problems at once, using the latest tech to finally realize a comprehensive engagement profile. Request a demo to learn more on how performance engagement can drive success at your organization.