Structured for Success — Right People, Right Roles, Moving Quickly but Efficiently
To make any movement, process, workflow, or nearly any other aspect of retail work effectively, it takes the right people. Building and supporting an Agile workflow that creates an agile environment requires talent and likely a different mindset than is commonly found in many retail environs today. Engagement is both a requirement and an outcome of a successful Agile-driven workstream. You need people who are willing to be fully committed to working and thinking in new ways. And, in doing so, you will strengthen the bonds to the projects, processes, and the company as a whole. It can become its own self-fulfilling prophecy in a good way.
Disengaged Staff Equals Disengaged Customers
Building a more nimble work environment is not just about improving productivity, finding efficiencies, or working faster. It is about a better customer experience overall. Certainly, the other outcomes are beneficial, but companies have been finding (and forcing) those in retail for years. As times have changed, customers have evolved, and the return on old practices has subsided. It is time for new thinking to emerge and build a stronger future. The previous couple of articles have made a case for moving to an Agile thought process in a new frontier – retail locations. The foundation still lies in having the right people doing the rights when it matters most.
Roles and responsibility
If you do additional research on the different aspects of working in an Agile workflow, you’ll find many different roles that need to be fulfilled. I am not sure using those strict definitions is necessary for retail locations. If you have a well-defined structure for your stores, that should suffice in ensuring you have the role needed to lead a change. The Store Leader must be the ‘Product Owner’ of the desired outcomes. He or she can assign other second-level leaders to run the day-to-day activities with a new approach. It will be necessary to engage the full team. Trying to change the environment to work differently without everyone on board and understanding the responsibilities they have in the change will not work otherwise.
Each day someone will need to review the outcomes of the changes underway and provide updates, feedback, and infuse energy into the needed activities of the day. Awareness of what is happening is a critical element to building long-term success. Team members will need to know they are part of the approach, so they can fully participate.
If you choose to introduce a different way to train or educate the store staff, they need to understand why they are being provided new information and the purpose of that information. Please do not assume they will understand it intuitively.
Wherever possible, connect the small changes you want to make to the areas of ownership within your location. The second and even third level leaders (if you have those levels) need to be involved in determining the actions that will be tested and implemented. They must be the empowered ones to drive the day-to-day change. They must become the coaches who help everyone else along the change curve to not only engage in new behaviors, but become recommenders of next steps and possible improvements.
Capturing feedback
Your Agile workflows are meant to deliver sustainable results, not a series of peaks and valleys. Getting the full team’s buy-in will ensure that consistency moving forward. The feedback loop cannot just be driven by numeric data points; it has to include people providing feedback as well. And yes, this can and will be subjective, but you are likely to miss opportunities for improvement and the likeliness of a sustained approach without this connection point. If you build a process that the team cannot easily adopt or use long-term, it will fail. When friction reaches a certain point, behaviors and actions will revert to trusted methods, and the experience will lose steam. Using a coaching approach to observe, learn, listen, and practice will help recognize where friction points exist and how to overcome those. That is where real empowerment is built.
Imagine how a team member will feel if asked how things are going; they provide feedback that leads to changing how everyone else does it. You can bet that they will continue to feel good about sharing their thoughts and ideas in the future. Plus, when they see their ideas being used for good, they are more likely to advise how they may improve because they feel as though it came from a peer who is also sharing their ideas. The cycle builds, and eventually, you land on an improved process where everyone is engaged because they were active participants in defining it.
A final element to consider when thinking about connecting people to the Agile process is recognizing the right behaviors. Often, perhaps too often, retailers reward only the final outcomes tied to a location’s performance. The effort, leadership, and behaviors that directly impacted those outcomes are overlooked. Additionally, some behaviors needed for an Agile environment take longer to produce the results needed on a larger scale. The quick, subtle changes may be evident through the observation, and change is clearly taking place, yet they have not manifested them in a way that reflects the budget given to the store. And, the opportunity to reward the behaviors that will ultimately lead to success is missed in the short term. That places the entire process at risk. Managers and store leaders will become frustrated that their efforts go unrewarded because of an outdated model of compensation recognition.
This yet again provides an opportunity for an Agile mindset of testing quickly and learning how new programs could flourish in your changing environment. Testing monthly or quarterly recognition and incentive programs using different criteria could be an excellent way to model the mindset and reward the behaviors that drive those very outcomes. It is certainly something to consider.
The people portion of the equation cannot be underestimated. Taking an Agile approach to your business will feel quite unfamiliar and likely uncomfortable to many existing retail leaders at all levels. Introducing the concepts in small steps can be a way to both educate what it looks like and help flatten the change curve to quicker adoption. Using some of the examples discussed in Retail is Detail — Balancing Done with Perfect and Using Data Effectively for Successful Retail Leadership can be a good way to get started on your journey. In the final article of the series, I will discuss how all the pieces come together. These can be the foundation to create that agile work environment that everyone is looking for in the coming months and years ahead to meet the ongoing changes in the retail space.
How will you connect your people to a changing mindset that leads to a successful Agile workflow?
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