It's payday weekend - what does it mean to me?

Its payday weekend again - either this weekend or next weekend for your customers, with the last day of June on Tuesday. I've often posted payday weekend notices on my blog here (http://mytimeinretail.blogspot.com/2014/03/it-payday-weekend-again.html & http://mytimeinretail.blogspot.com/2014/02/payday-weekend.html) but without too many mentions of what that actually means. So I'll go back to the basics.

What is payday weekend?

In basic terms, it's the weekend straight after the majority of your customers get paid. This is when they are feeling the most flush with money and traditionally when they spend more of this money. The last week or so of the month before payday has often been where people have cut back and only dorms on essentials. They then break over that threshold and have their monthly salary in their account and are ready to treat themselves again. This is when the pursestrings are loosened.

What is different?

In actuality nothing is different - even more so in these days of ready credit but psychologically people feel that they have more money. And this applies to your team as well. And the difference to the town you operate in is that there are more people out shopping for more items at more money. And you have to prepare differently. Depending on your retail business, you will probably need more staff, more stock and your shop needs to be as ready as it can be in time for the expected footfall. So all non-customer tasks should be completed and out if the way long before the weekend trade really kicks in. Replenishnemt needs to be spot on and targeted in the right areas - as effective as possible and not disruptive to the flow of customers.

To some of you, this may seem like the basics but it's important to ensure that you have a plan and a routine to ready yourself and your team for these occasions, a they can make the difference in gaining new customers and retaining existing customers.

Customers

How you are set up for payday weekends and how your customers experience you at this time sets the time for their future visits. If you are more likely to see customers at this time, then you will have a larger pool of customers to make an impression on than normal. Each customer's experience with you this weekend can determine whether they see you as a delight to shop in (for those of you prepared for the extra trade) or a hassle (for those playing catch-up) and you need to ask yourself what you want to be here. The "delights" will see new customers converted and existing customers retained. The "hassles" will see a slow erosion of their trade.

It's time to step forward!

Not everything can be bought on the High Street-

How do you stop a downward spiral?

I've worked with retailers that have been going through a downward spiral and struggling to address it. By a downward spiral, I mean a drop in sales, that ends up with a cut in staffing, that in itself prompts a drop in sales and so on. There are other symptoms that usually go with the spiral, and they include-

*Low staff morale

*High staff turnover

*Low customer satisfaction

*Uncompleted tasks

*Low personal morale (the business owner)

Obviously this combination of factors can be pretty poisonous for a retail organisation - or any organisation for that matter.

Dealing with it at any given point in the timeline is difficult, but not being there every day with your team in the shop floor may well mean that you miss a lot of the warning signs above and end up dealing with it when it's festered for a while. Having to deal with it at this's the stage is much more difficult as you will now be dealing with some of the after-effects of the problem as well as the problem itself.

So, how do you stop the problems from getting any worse?

I've worked with single independent retailers and in national High Street chains and the first step in any of these organisations is to communicate effectively with your team. Spending time with the team on the shop floor may seem like an obvious solution but it definitely is the start of the process. Talking to your team in their everyday roles and everyday setting is a great place to start. And a large part of your communication technique here needs to be listening. You need to be able to find out the feelings of your team and there's no better place to do it. At the same time you are doing this, it's also the ideal place to communicate the plans for the organisation - to let your team know about the past changes and any changes to come. These open lines of communication change the way that the organisation and you are viewed by the team.

Of course, communication on its own won't be able to turn around morale and solve all the problems. In partnership with this, the team needs the feeling that things are turning around. If the store or company is feeling like it's still spiralling downwards, then even effective, positive communication may struggle to stem the negative feelings. At this point, every small victory needs to be celebrated. A new contract, a big sale, a particularly good piece of customer service - anything that has a positive feel to it. Celebrate these small wins with the person responsible and the whole team. This feeling of small positives will start to chip away at the previous negative vibes and start to get the team feeling better about themselves.

If you find yourself in this situation, either as the owner of a retailer or as part of the store management team of a larger retailer then I feel for you. But I think that by flowing the above steps, you can start to put positives in the eyes of your team and turn things around.

Do organisations have an obligation to people other than their shareholders?

I ask this question because, as I grow older, read more about the world and experience life with more and more organisations I see things that perhaps I hadn't seen before.

I've recently read the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi and one of the  overwhelming themes was living on what you need to get by.

I would put it to you that many, many multinational organisations gather in vastly more resources than they need and yet their staff at the bottom level struggle to exist on the minimum wage. The question emerges - do the leaders of the organisation at the top have more of an obligation to look after their employees (higher wages, more annual leave and better benefits) than their obligation to their shareholders (lower costs, greater profit and better dividends)?

And it's not just with wages that I feel organisations need to look at their obligations. I read this article yesterday with some interest-

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/boots-to-cut-700-office-jobs-in-the-uk-10305508.html?origin=internalSearch

A genuine "restructure" where a company redeploys it's resources into different parts of the business for commercial reasons makes sense. Adapting the online offering, moving people from traditional marketing to the social media team or moving people from one store to another to react to customer demand all make sense.

The euphemistic restructuring that companies use as a buzzword now means job cuts and a drive to reduce the overheads a business faces - at the detriment of the workers who lose jobs, have hours cut, have to relocate, are under-employed or don't deal with the change very well, sometimes because they aren't supported through this change by the organisation that brought it about.

Again, it begs the question of where the company's priority obligation lies.

I've often thought that there are enough people in the UK that believe in equality and fairness and they could be mobilised to buy shares in a company and apply pressure on the policies that the company has, in terms of salaries, environmtal considerations and ethical business practices.

A stitch in time saves nine applies to business as well

There is such a thing as work that stops more work. For instance, at home yesterday my wife didn't want to take the extra 30 seconds in checking that she had the right log-in details for online banking. She put in the wrong code 3 times, and locked herself out of accessing the account. This prompted a 5 minute telephone call to the bank, passwords being reset and having to effectively re-register through the system to select new passwords and then having to reset access through the apps on both the iPhone and the ipad. In total, approximately 15 minutes of extra work.

And it's like that in retail. Being able to see events before they happen comes from forward-thinking and experience. Having witnessed events unfold before is a good market that they may happen again if left unchecked. Seeing an employee is unhappy or down is the point in time to deal with it - not waiting until they've handed in their notice. The extra work in ensuring that they are happy is a lot less work than dealing with the fallout and the recruitment and training process.  Having that sit down talk and being able to listen and hopefully help one of your team is easier than processing the resignation, doing exit interviews, advertising the role, assessing the applications, conducting the interviews, selecting the applicant, offering the role, completing the paperwork, starting the induction and training the new recruit.

It's just a short blog today, but I must emphasise the point before I go. Every part of your role is determined by decision-making. Even inaction is a decision not to act on a particular issue. The people who work around you will form their opinion of you based on what you do, how you act. It is therefore important that you seek to address issues at the earliest convenient juncture and try to avert situations from becoming things that absorb vast amounts of your time.

And this applies to situations with customers as well. Dealing with potential complaints in a decisive and definite manner will stop them turning into complaints that turn ugly and take up your time. And your customers will appreciate it. For example, if a customer believes that they have been wrongly charged for an item, taking them to the relevant part of the store and going through the pricing with them usually resolved the situation at source, rather than it escalating at the till point into some kind of argument. If this doesn't help, then a course of action to satisfy them is much better than allowing them to walk away unhappy.