What qualifies a product as one of the best labor management systems? Is it the ability to remotely manage workers? A feature that lets you edit scheduling on the fly? Or perhaps it’s a report that tells you more about who your top performers are. While choosing a labor management system can be overwhelming, some of the biggest names on the scene have some key features in common that you should look out for.
What Do the Best Labor Management Systems Look Like?
Getting straight to the point on the matter, do you know what the best labor management systems look like? What do the best staff management solutions accomplish, and how would any of these impact your business as a whole? Perhaps most importantly, do you know where in your staff management system you are haemorrhaging the most in terms of revenues or misallocated production cycles?
Taking a look at how and where time and effort are spent running your business is going to be the first place to start. Here are a set of items that make for a great starting point in determining where you are presently and where a new or upgraded labor management solution should be taking you.
- Tracking staff hours vs. hours scheduled. Managing staff used to be simple. Schedule staff, taking into account their overall availability, and make sure that they are punching in and out on time, including for breaks. This has unfortunately grown more complex over the years, making it imperative that you be able to quickly and easily perform an analysis on your staff to ensure that they are only reporting the appropriate number of hours worked.
- Monitoring transactions vs. voids for potential points of product leakage. This has been coming up more frequently in recent months as a newer method of employee theft. The employee scans an item as a sale, and then voids the sale but keeps the item, costing retailers in particular an average of $1766 in return fraud. While product leakage is not just an internal issue, these instances are the easiest to prevent and can be made easier by introducing technology that performs a transaction reconciliation against voids and actual inventory levels.
- Aligning staff schedules to match peak and slow periods. Have you ever walked into your shop to find three of your staff hanging around on their phones without a customer in sight? While it is important to have staff on hand in the event of a customer surge, equipping yourself with a next-gen POS will identify the most likely times for these customer surges to occur, saving you on labor costs and your staff on boredom.
Looking into and defining what each of these points means to your business operations brings you one step closer to achieving optimized labor management. The next step, once you have this information in hand, is to take a good look at the innovative POS options on the market. Many of these come with highly versatile, labor management functionalities that will equip you with an easy road towards implementing advanced staff management processes.
The Best Labor Management Systems Are More Than Payroll
Enhancing how you manage your staff will take you beyond payroll accuracy and efficiency. Many of the best labor management systems come with an innovative POS solution in place. This commonality arms you with flexible ways to easily realize deeper savings and improve customer satisfaction in one easy to manage system. Inventory management is easier to accomplish, and your data points can produce statistics around who is on duty when the majority of shoplifting or “dine and dash” events occur.
With over 35% of product shrinkage events occurring from external sources, this can be a big win when it comes to reducing costs. This allows you to get insights into which staff members are more prone to these risks, presenting additional training opportunities around loss prevention. Also, with a modern POS solution in place comes automation potential for some routine tasks, freeing your staff to be around the customers more often. This gives you a closer relationship to your customer base while providing a natural deterrent against theft events.
Lastly, the data gained via transactions, when meshed with inventory management information, gives you a sixth sense about what products are on the wane. You can tap into the information on hand to project the next hot item, helping you to keep your offerings trendy and fresh. This builds your reputation as a business that always executes precisely at the right time, and makes your customers feel understood. Getting to this point, though, requires taking your in-store tech to the next level.
Modernized Labor Management Means a Modern POS System
To put it bluntly, there is no other way to achieve the labor management efficiencies required in today’s business world without having a high-end POS solution in place. The unfortunate reality is that most older POS software solutions fall short when it comes to the level of labor management that is required to continue down the road to success.
Diving into the field of POS options in the marketplace today is confusing and anxiety-provoking enough to freeze many business owners in their tracks. It is important not to let this process stop you from becoming a better business. You know what you need, but do you know how to put all the pieces together?
The Best Labor Management Systems Require Guidance
Getting your labor management to a point where it’s firing on all cylinders requires a high level of expertise in multiple areas. You must know what the latest staff management best practices are, how to effectively apply them without creating an anxious work atmosphere, while bringing along the tech to tie it all together. This is where seeking the expertise of a business consultant with deep POS experience can really make the difference.
When you reach out to talech, you gain more than a POS solution provider. We take the time to learn your business inside and out so that the labor management solution we design for you reflects current and projected labor management trends. Reach out to us today to sign up for a free demo and find out how we can leverage existing POS trends to elevate your store to new heights.