Retail Management Going Mobile
Last week, Nikki and I had the opportunity to attend Kronos’ User Group Conference in Las Vegas, NV. Perhaps the three most striking things we saw were the big shift to mobile workforce management, and creating an interface that works for Millenials and old folks alike.
Let’s start with our favorite topic, mobility. Kronos is rolling out apps for both managers and employees. Early adopters are in health care, but we can certainly see most of these apps coming to retail really soon.
Mobile WFM automatically notifies employees of an open shift. When an employee accepts the shift, it is closed out and an audit trail is produced. This is a great time saver for managers in any industry.
Additional applications released include the following for managers: timecard exceptions, timecard approvals, and the ability to manage time off requests. Additional applications released for employees includerequest time off and view accrued time available, view schedule, and punch in and out from the phone.
We know most retailers will raise their eyebrows at the notion of allowing employees to punch in and out from their phones, but Kronos execs pointed out a couple of caveats: 1) the phone does report and record the GPS location of the user, and 2) the application is very useful for a mobile workforce, such as home healthcare workers.
While we’re talking 21st century technology, adoption challenges are less around the technology itself (deployment takes less than a week), than they are around the cultural change associated with self-service. Opening shifts up to anyone eligible means a manager can’t just turn to his “go to” person, and employees can’t go to their managers directly to “claim a shift”. The majority of employees appreciate the implied fairness, but change rarely comes easily. It seems better to start with more traditional forms of employee self-service and then move on to mobile self-service. Policies and procedures must be updated, and change comes to departments that don’t typically change very often.
Most interesting to us, the apps assume workers are using their own phones. We have long predicted that real traction of mobility in retail would only come when customers and employees were empowered on their own devices. Retailers don’t have to maintain them, and customers find using their own phones less intrusive to their privacy.
That brings us to the subject of the multi-generational workforce. On the one hand, Kronos has built its nifty new User Interface to appeal to Millennials, but when we sat down to discuss the workforce of the next decade we realized it’s completely multi-generational. Baby Boomers like me aren’t exiting the workforce any time soon – we can’t really afford to. So we started talking about differences between Millennials and Boomers. The obvious is Millennials comfort with the web, lack of interest in email (texting is just faster), and growing up mobile. Somewhat less intuitive is the Millennials tolerance for minor bugs. Any Facebook user knows the software is updated almost daily, and generally without any notice. While the privacy issues tend to loom large, we rarely hear any complaints about buggy software, even though we ALL know it’s ALWAYS buggy. Users just press the equivalent of F5 to reload the screens, and move on. That’s oddly good news for technology providers. Provide a simple interface, allow users to access it on their own devices, and as long as your database back-end is sound, let her rip. Boomers tend to be a bit…fussier. We prefer that our software works and works well, or we’re liable to complain that we can’t do our jobs.
We think Kronos is headed in the right direction with simplicity…and we also believe continued exposure to new technologies will “loosen up” our Baby Boomer peers. Probably most exciting of all, the shift we’ve been awaiting – with mobile coming front and center on technology providers’ and retailers’ radar screens, seems to be occurring. We expect to see rapid implementation cycles, and more reliance on that thing we have in our pockets – that we used to call a “phone”.
About the author: Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner Retail Systems Research, a provider of insights and consulting services into business and technology challenges facing retailers. This is a copyrighted article that is syndicated by permission of RSR.
