Last Minute Holiday Tips for Seasonal Staffing

The holiday season is here and merchants must be ready to serve customers with holiday cheer. After all, your store’s sales will not be their best if the associates working with your customers are not performing at their best. Leveraging seasonal employees presents challenges, since these associates are often less knowledgeable about your store’s inventory, customer service expectations, and your store’s procedures. However, with modern technology, retailers can create a contemporary workplace that streamlines processes for seasonal employees and properly enables them to better serve your customers’ needs. Consider the tips below to strengthen your seasonal staffing efforts this holiday season and beyond.

Leverage employee availability across multiple store locations.

Access to a large pool of qualified talent is essential for keeping your stores adequately staffed, . Merchants must utilize their top performing associates during peak hours to maximize sales. Scheduling your top performers across multiple storefronts is a complex process. With next-generation workforce technologies, employers can see the availability of all employees – whether seasonal or not – and schedule them according to peak demand across multiple storefronts at once. Unexpected or even scheduled staffing needs can fulfilled by accessing experienced employees across multiple locations. This is an added value for retailers any time of year and is particularly valuable during the busy holiday season.

Make scheduling convenient for your seasonal employees.

 The holidays are joyful and merry but few refer to the employee scheduling the same way. As the majority of seasonal employees are millennials, the best way to engage with your staff is with a modern mobile application. Using technology to optimally schedule your employees reduces understaffing due to scheduling conflicts and allows associates to manage their schedules no matter where they are or what time of day it is. Mobile access to scheduling provides time-saving benefits which alleviate staff workload while boosting employee satisfaction at the same time.  Collectively, these efforts deliver a modern workforce experiences, simplify employee communications, and deliver convenience to merchants and employees.

Respect your seasonal staff’s work-life preferences.

Through an AI-powered matching process, employees can own their scheduling preferences while businesses are able to optimally staff their stores. This does more than just put seasonal employees in control. It also gives them a sense of confidence, helps to automate many of a retailer’s responsibilities and allows businesses to focus on uniquely human tasks like selling and training. Supporting employees and their preferences is among the top considerations to recognize during the holidays since by doing this, retailers ultimately help associates feel more appreciated. When considering your employee’s working hour preferences, you are also improving upon an in-store experience powered by associates ready and excited to interact with customers. This increases motivation and quality of performance, as well as, increases the business’s ability to sell.

Whether your employees are part-time, full-time, or seasonal, everyone will appreciate a technology enabled scheduling experience.  Their happiness will become the gift that keeps on giving in the form of happier customers and higher sales.

See how Legion’s AI-powered labor platform can help you easily match demand with labor this holiday!

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