Impact of HR Technology Solution in Retail Management

Challenges Faced by the Retail Industry

Their Sr. HR Manager during the pre-sales discussions revealed that there were many administrative and HR issues with the retail store sites. Due to high focus on sales, the Retail Store Managers has no focus on issues like attendance, discipline and critical HR practices. The problem areas that were identified during the discussions were:

• Challenge 1. Irregularities in the attendance data of the staff at retail stores and other regional offices. Sometimes many of the staff did not sign the attendance register or signed at their wish and will. During HR audits it was found that some staff signed the attendance register just at the end of the day. Some Customer Service Executives have signed the attendance register but were not present at the duty.
  
  
• Challenge 2. There was no mechanism to track the leave data of employees. Employees did not know their exact leave data. At the end of the year it was revealed that some employees have taken excess leave while some employees worked incessantly, thus causing frustration among the hard working lot.
  
  
• Challenge 3. Discrepancy in HR reports: HR provided a set of Excel Sheets and paper-based forms to Store Managers to maintain data. However, many Store Managers created their unique formats of reports making it difficult to collate the reports using Excel macros. The data thus collated had to be verified again and again, yet there were errors at the end of the day.
  
  
• Challenge 4. Salary Discrepancies and Issues: HR and attendance data was used to generate data for payroll. As there were discrepancies in HR data, these also found their way in payroll data. This created many salary discrepancies and caused numerous salary issues raised by the employees, thus lowering employee satisfaction rate and also effecting the employee morale.
  
  
• Challenge 5. Mis-management of Employees Expense during Travel etc. There were lots of travel and expense activities in the organization. The travel and expenses data that reached the head quarters was based on individual's feedback and there was no mechanism to verify the validity or requirements of the travel. There was no policy based approval mechanism for travel and expenses. The decisions were taken at local levels and the expenses were also disbursed locally. This was also negatively impacting the company's budget. It was very difficult to analyze or validate a travel expense.
  
  
• Challenge 6. Training and Communication Issues: As company was growing at a fast pace, training employees on various HR procedures and policies was becoming increasingly difficult. Thus employees took the decisions based on their previous experience or personal logic and created unnecessary hassle for HR to intervene and resolve. A few good employees even was thus causing a harm to organization's Employer Brand.

Impact of challenges

The above challenges directly or indirectly effected critical business metrics like availability of staff at the stores, Customer Service, Professionalism, and financial issues like unnecessary expenses, lowered sales and poor customer experience.

Analysis of the Problem

After identifying the challenges, a stream of discussions were conducted by the Saigun's Team Project Managers, Analysts, & HR Consultant and the Organization's HR Managers, HR Executives and the Operations Managers. These discussions churned out the following as the top 5 reasons of the problem:

• Lack of consistent HR systems across the organization.
  As operations managers come from different domains and industries they bring with them different practices and feel comfortable in applying the same to their current organization.
  
  
• Lack of consistent, recorded log, and communication mechanism:
  There was no reliable feedback mechanism for HR to communicate policies, change in processes and training for employees and managers. Thus there were many confusions among employees about the HR issues. Also each one tried to interpret the HR policies in their own favor.
  
  
• Lack of Proper Tools with HR, Employees Managers and Leaders:
  Neither employees nor manager had appropriate and easy to use tools to follow HR practices and policies, they invested more time in creating improvements rather than using existing practices. Thus they were reluctant in partnering with HR and considered HR as an hindrance to their routine jobs.
  
  
• Delayed reports to make Business decisions:
  The HR reports were often delayed or completely avoided while making business critical decisions.
  
  
• Lack of Accountability:
  As there were no Job Descriptions, SMART Goals, mechanism or work-flows for managing human resources or for approvals, managers and employees did not feel accountable to HR. During meetings they tried to stress their own decision making as an important factor and provided excuses for declining performance like competitive market and economy etc.