Chief Learning Officer - February 2008 - (Page 24)

learning solutions Learning and Development for the Retail Industry Kellye Whitney, Lindsay Edmonds Wickman and Brian Summerfield With the holidays concluded, the retail industry is winding down from its busiest time of year. Inevitably, this period includes a great deal of employee turnover: Thousands of workers who came in a couple of months ago have now left to go back to school, return to home life or take another job, and thousands more will sign up for a brief stint in late fall this year. Yet, throughout the year, retail organizations will be challenged by hiring and retention much more than other industries. It’s no longer just that “good help is hard to find.” It’s that good help is hard to find — and keep. Being able to recruit, train and retain high-quality retail professionals is critical, especially given the time and resources involved with onboarding. As it is with any other business, organizations in the retail sector should develop engaging, relevant and performance-based learning programs for their employees if they want to keep them. Ensuring that each sales associate is properly trained can have a positive effect on the bottom line and improve employee proficiency and morale. jobs are very much about problem solving, and it’s kind of a more engaging retail job than others,” said Leslie Joyce, vice president and CLO of Home Depot. “The second piece is that we have a culture and an approach to customer service that keeps our associates really, really loyal. We call them orangeblooded. They are a part of something bigger than just selling things. They are a part of making people’s homes better.” However, most retailers face the issue of workforce churn on a regular basis. How they deal with it from a learning perspective can vary greatly. To improve her company’s head count, Sharon Smart, director of training at specialty bedding retailer Mattress Giant, helped revamp the company’s learning strategy to counter the detrimental effects of a rapidly changing workforce. Before 2005, Mattress Giant’s turnover rate was more than 300 percent, but with the recently designed program, the turnover rate is around 75 percent and has been as low as 55 percent. “A large turnover in our business is absolutely not a benefit,” Smart said. “We worked really hard to bring that down, and part of that was changing out [our] executive team, and we were February 2008 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 24 The Role of Training in Retention When it comes to retaining talent, not all retailers are created equal. By virtue of the specialized products they sell or the unique culture of the enterprise, some will be able to naturally attract and keep certain kinds of workers. Home Depot is an example of such an organization. “The nature of our business is that people who like home improvement tend to work in our [associate] positions, and the http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - February 2008

Chief Learning Officer - February 2008 Editor's Letter Table of Contents Business Impact Trends Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial Learning Solutions Home Depot: Building Better Associates CLO Profile Environment Realizing the Vision of “One Philips” Tactics Sun Microsystems’ Next-Generation Worker Video Game Recruiting Tool Productivity The Regence Group: Blended Measurement Human Capital NASA: A Case Study in Technical Leadership Development Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - February 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.