10 Main HR Challenges of Retail Sector Owners and Human Resource Executives

With A Growing Economy And A Youth-Hefty Lifestyle Consumer Base, India Is Perceived As ‘Most Promising Land’ For The Global And Domestic Retailers.

According to a survey of IBEF, it’s expected to increase by 60% by 2020 making it a US$ 1.1 trillion market.

Total number of supermarket had increased from 500 in 2002 to 8500 in 2016

The boom within the retail sector in India and its corresponding spike in demand for talent has underscored the necessity for effective hour systems. The performance of human resources has special significance in retail because the staff operates in an exceedingly distinctive atmosphere.

In any retail organization, the people who talk to the customer, when a customer walked into your store are the face and revenue getter of your organization.

“Take away my factories, but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory.”

Andrew Carnegie, the American steel billionaire.

Here a list of top hr challenges faces by a retail organization human resource executive.

1. Employee Tracking

Most of the retailers have there store pan-India and have a lot of different store in a same geographical area so tracking of employee productivity is a tedious task.

2. Manpower Planning As Per Infrastructure

Each retail store has different sections for fulfilling the demand of the consumer base, a study had shown that if a retail customer specialist is trained well it will automatically increase the profit of the store and also it creates a good customer experience.
For examples – If there is a demand for the milk-related product in your store in morning and daily needs item on weekdays you need to have more trained employee in this section so that service will be fast and that section will not be overcrowded.

Constant monitoring will help management to know where
they are lacking manpower planning and can help to train the employees to achieve the organizational objective.

3. Seasonal Demand

During the festival, there are always rush on retail stores.so employee demands are more and workforce needed to be more organised during this time to handle this volume of customers.

4. Lack Of Formal Education

There is the requirement of qualified and talented manpower to look after the day to day operations and cater to the wide spectrum of customer desires. As there is lack of formal vocational institutes where the employee can be trained, most of the retailers in India depend on in-house training or fulfilling their training needs with small institutes.

5.Bad Loans

Bad loans are the big problem in the retail sector as workers in this industry take a lot of loans from the company and as well as from bank so proper tracking is required for maintaining the balance.

6.Women In Retailing

There are a lot of women in retailing and its also scientifically proven that women increase the productivity of retail store if they are working properly as they have the ability to pursue people and they have genetical ability to work with perfection and multitasking.
They can be easily trained and they can maintain a store more properly than men.

Some policies need to be made by the organisation for giving women some extra privilege like maternity leave, sharing working hours e.t.c.

7.Threat Of Poaching

Employee poaching is also very high both in organized as well as an unorganized retail industry. Skilled manpower is scarce in this industry and as such attracting the employees of competitors by offering them better salaries is a rather easy option.
A lot of capital is invested in each individual for his training and development, so if any employee leaves its a loss of organisation. So you have to always retain good employee because they are assets of your organisation.

8.Career Advancement

A lot of employees in the retail industry even don’t know the path for growth in their careers.
Proper goal management and training are required so that they will grow and their growth will also help the organisation to grow, Goal completion rewards are one of the initiatives that can be done by the organisation.
Some training like proper communication classes, personality development classes, Packing Techniques, Technical training are few of the things organisation may adopt for growth.

9.Stressful Environment

The working pattern of the retail industry requires employee to put in long hours of work which generally cause fatigue and result in lower motivation among employees. Besides this, in part-time and casual jobs there is less job security, flexible shifts, unlimited working hours, lower salary and benefits & poor working conditions resulting into stress.

10.Analytics Overview

As there are the vast number of employees working in a single organisation Management level people rely only on data that is shown in there databook or screen to address the problems some common problems may be employee attendance, individual store productivity, retention of employees analyzing this data can figure out problem area so that they can act on that before its too late.

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Source :

1. https://www.ibef.org/uploads/industry/Infrographics/large/Retail-December-2017.pdf
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/791302/india-number-of-supermarkets/
3. http://iosrjournals.org/iosr-jbm/papers/Vol16-issue1/Version-7/A016170107.pdf
4. https://www.ibef.org/industry/retail-india.aspx
5. indiaretailing.com