Key takeaways

• Building adaptability and resilience is necessary for large organizations to survive volatility, but few are sure how to do it.
• Physical retail can learn from eCommerce, which uses data, experimentation, and rapid feedback cycles to improve, managing huge businesses with small, lean teams.
• The goals of eComm and Agile Stores are similar: simplify, speed up, and engage people.

Building adaptability, growth, and resilience is now a business imperative. Increasing organizational agility is now almost on the same par as the traditional drivers to grow profits or attract more customers.

Its recency, however, means that few really know how to go about achieving it. Even those leading the pack are doing it with guerilla tactics: learning from the theorists, learning from each other, and learning from their mistakes.

We’ve had our eyeballs to the data for seven years and seen what’s worked, and what turned out to be a waste of time. In this article, we share what good agility looks like in-store operations as well as a roadmap to suggest and inspire what it could look like for other retailers.

Agile Store Operations are as easy and effective to manage as eCommerce.

The easiest way to think about Agile Store Operations is to think about how your eCommerce operations work. With heritage in the software world, eCommerce organizations use data, experimentation, and rapid feedback cycles to nimbly iterate their way to successful outcomes. With the right approach and the right tools, small teams can orchestrate simple and engaging customer journeys for large customer bases.

In sharp contrast to the sleek efficiency of digital technology, one only needs to walk into a store back office and see the cluttered notice boards and paperwork which are somehow expected to drive efficient operations in stores. But managing the physical is still very different to digital and so we need to carry out some creative interpretation. So, what do best-in-class Agile Store Operations look like?

Agile retail stores have three primary goals:

1. Simplify. Reduce the vast array of information and required activities of the field to focus only on what matters.
2. Speed up. Reduce the cycle time on information to ensure team members have what they need to correct, adjust, and learn.
3. Engage colleagues. Create more meaningful working environments for store teams, improving onboarding and retention and engagement in the job and ultimately translating into better customer experiences.

The need for simplicity.

Store teams were drowning even before the pandemic and things have only gotten worse. Recent evidence suggests workloads have increased by at least 30%. Ensuring teams spend their time only on what matters is essential, yet most managers still spend less than 40% of their week on the floor or coaching teams.

The current approach to management is not helping. Our most recent store audit noted that the typical store is sent over 20 reports, and more than 50 tasks a week. Analyzing, understanding, and actioning all this information in itself becomes a full-time job.

Simplifying operations to achieve agility requires retailers to:

• Unify information into a single place, consolidating all the data, tasks, and alerts that are being sent.
• Personalize and prioritize information by store, removing the 96% of irrelevant information for store colleagues and managers, focusing just on the activities and exceptions that are essential and actionable.
• Streamline workflows – capturing actions and their impact digitally to provide insights for central teams and scale improvements.
• Deliver information in real-time and in the most accessible format – mobile, which is now the primary in-store device.

The need for speed.

Less than 40% of an organization at any one time knows what their goals are. Today’s volatile environments make this even harder. Large organizations are reluctant to change goals too often because companywide alignment takes so long, but it means they’re inflexible to any kind of change and risk dangerously lagging behind. Retail needs to be able to realign continuously and rapidly between the center and field.

Many of the retailers we talk to felt that information sharing was too slow between the center and the field. There are 3 core challenges. Firstly, timely insights and analysis. Although real-time data can be shared, waiting six weeks for an overall picture of performance is too slow. Secondly, information back from the field is sporadic. Ad-hoc surveys are a poor way to understand how the field engages and acts on information.

And finally, there is the challenge of disseminating information across the field. Sharing of best practice, for instance, is often reliant on a District Manager to manually communicate with nothing systematically captured or communicated across regions beyond company meetings.

Speeding up operations requires retailers to:

• Have communication channels that rapidly align teams to their goals and metrics, while also having the flexibility to adjust and realign.
• Distribute business performance information to the stores in real-time and share field feedback to the center in a rapid and consistent way.
• Crowdsource insights and best practice sharing across the field and from the center.

The need for engagement.

As Sam Walton once said, “If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores”. 59% of customers will walk away after a few bad experiences, and your store associates are at the core of driving those experiences.

So when 41% of retail employees hardly ever enjoy coming to work, the worst of any sector, it is clear that something needs resolving.

To boost engagement, employees want:

• Feedback on how they are performing, and how the actions they are taking make a tangible difference.
• Guidance and coaching in a more continuous and constructive way than just the annual review and monthly store visit.
• Autonomy, but not at the expense of visibility and personal accountability to performance, retail teams are competitive and want to know that the assessment of their performance is fair.