Life after COVID brought about many changes to concepts that used to be simple and comprehensible. One of these concepts is the labor market dynamics. While the specter of the recession is looming, the labor market seems to have missed the memo. The industry enters the New Year 2023 with a clear deficit of the workforce, and the managers hardly manage to fill the work shifts. The convenience store operators now routinely see a triple-digit turnover, and some of the c-store managers may lack the tools to efficiently and effectively manage this complex and impactful situation.
Thus, knowing the actionable strategies for labor management optimization and reduction of personnel attrition is vitally – no, critically – important.
The variety of factors that, in addition to wages, should be taken into account when considering what can be done to resolve the issue and keep the c-store with sufficient - but not excessive - number of employees to keep up with the demand, was reviewed in a recent nationwide survey conducted by Legion.
This survey of 1,500 hourly workers and 500 store managers found that 87% of store managers feel as stressed or more stressed about the holiday season than they did last year — and hourly workers are feeling the strain, too.
Nearly seven in 10 (69%) managers listed staff shortages as a reason to feel stressed. "The thought that the great resignation would dissipate over time is not a reality," said Michael Spataro, Chief Customer Officer at Legion. "The staff shortage is here to stay."
40% of hourly employees said their biggest concern is trying to manage work and family. Some specific challenges listed in the survey include not having enough people, scheduling nightmares, poor communication of changes and having no time off.
Traffic flow by its inherent nature is highly volatile, and the ability to match the number of available personnel with the fluctuating traffic demand is a great benefit. Scheduling is particularly important to employees, who often work multiple jobs but still want to spend holiday time with their families.
The hourly employees are under a ton of pressure. Flexibility in the form of complimentary schedules that make it possible to work both jobs while maintaining some level of work-life balance is a way to ease that pressure.
The key to dealing with issues like flexible scheduling and adequate staffing for handling the changing customer load is switching from the old, traditional techniques to new automated tools using smart data analytics. Currently 60% of store managers still use paper-based processes or spreadsheets for scheduling, while admitting that matching employee preferences and availability with the needs of the business and creating fair, equitable schedules is the most difficult task.
As with many other challenges, automation is the best solution. There are scheduling automation tools on the market, but what they require is the localized, focused and up-to-date information on customer demand. With this information, c-store managers can use the scheduling tools of their choice and achieve the much-needed results with ease.
The customer demand data is especially important to the business categories that are reliant on road traffic. As the traffic flow is very volatile, it may demonstrate peaks lasting from 30 minutes to several hours during which the traffic demand is many times more than average value. Also, traffic fluctuations have three cycle levels: intraday, intraweek and seasonal, and quantitative parameters of these cycles vary substantially between the sites. They can be revealed only with localized analysis. This is exactly the ability that Ticon methodology provides. And it should be noted that for all roadside business locations, the customer demand is strongly correlated with two parameters: traffic volume and driver behavior. Both of these demonstrate pronounced periodic behavior, with day-, week- and season-related periods. Moreover, for each site, traffic patterns are quite stable, but between sites they change unpredictably.
Therefore, if you want to plan personnel effectively, you may benefit from ordering our report every 2 years, and see in these reports all the necessary parameters and their changes (see sample report here). We'd love to tell you how we get this information, why it's reliable, and give you tips on how to use it in staff planning - just order a demo from this link. Here we will only show an example from which you can see how convenient it is to know that on certain days, such as during the weekends of July and August (Fig 1), in order to serve the customers and ensure their satisfaction, you will need additional staff members. But in January, on weekends, you can let the staff take some time off. Of course, each specific site will have its own findings, sometimes expected, more often unexpected and unpredictable - but always useful and helping you to get benefits greatly exceeding the costs of traffic analytics. Suffice it to say that a traffic report that helps you optimally plan your staff throughout the year will cost you about 5% of your daily turnover. Is this not a good deal?
These ample and reliable traffic data can be found in traffic analysis reports offered by Ticon. With the information on intra-day and intra-week fluctuation, a c-store manager can plan ahead for the hours and days of week with higher and lower customer demand, giving the employees the much-demanded flexibility while achieving the higher rates of customer satisfaction – and higher sales numbers.
Contact us today at info@ticon.co with your questions about applying Ticon data analytics to further the success of your business.
