Peak season places greater demands on your retail workforce as trading activity intensifies. Gaps in staffing or employee capabilities become harder to manage under this additional pressure and may leave teams unable to handle rising workloads.
Preparing your workforce ahead of peak helps ensure your teams can perform effectively when customer demand rises. Here are three ways you can build a workforce that is ready to perform when peak-season demand rises.
- Forecast peak-season workforce demand
Use workforce planning to anticipate your peak-season staffing requirements. Retail demand can fluctuate significantly during peak trading periods, so you need to understand how many employees you need at different times.
For example, if you expect a sharp increase in December footfall, you might require greater store-floor coverage at weekends than you would during normal trading periods. Anticipating this change helps you match staffing levels to expected demand.
With enough employees available when trading volumes rise, your teams are better placed to handle the additional workload.
- Identify critical skills gaps early
Conduct a skills gap analysis before peak season begins. Missing capabilities can become more consequential when trading pressure increases, making it important to identify where employees lack skills their roles will require.
Consider a retailer that expects higher click-and-collect volumes but discovers that too few store employees have training in order fulfilment. Identifying this gap before volumes rise gives the business time to train more employees in the process.
Closing priority skills gaps before trading intensifies reduces the risk of employees lacking the capabilities they need to handle peak workloads.
- Strengthen your people function
Ensure your People function has enough capacity and expertise for peak season. Peak trading increases the level of workforce support required from HR, so your People team needs enough resources to respond to employee and manager needs.
In practice, a retailer expanding its seasonal workforce could find that its existing HR team lacks the employee-relations capacity to support the larger workforce. This capability gap might create a need to hire for relevant HR jobs before peak pressures intensify.
The result is a people function with enough capacity to support managers and employees as workforce demands increase.
Wrapping up…
Peak-season success starts with ensuring your workforce is ready for the demands your business expects to face.
Assess whether your workforce can meet those demands well before peak trading begins. Doing so gives you time to address weaknesses that could otherwise leave teams struggling to handle higher workloads.
How prepared is your workforce to perform when peak-season demand arrives?
Terry Clark is the Publisher and Content Director of 365 Retail, with more than a decade of experience covering retail design, technology innovations, store openings and the wider retail industry. He also works closely with leading retailers, suppliers, agencies, events and industry awards across the UK.
