Retail and hospitality organizations are experiencing record frontline turnover as they face tough market competition, time pressures, and higher complexities of managing a frontline workforce. According to recent research from Workday and Longitude—which surveyed more than 500 senior executives across healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, and retail—organizations that report lower frontline turnover offer their workforces increased scheduling control and flexibility, leverage data to evaluate frontline experiences and expectations, are more likely to invest in online training and development tools to support skills development, and elevate the voice of their employees by listening—and responding—to their evolving needs and preferences.

Workday helps global retail organizations support their total workforce—everyone from frontline employees and managers to extended workers—while prioritizing their needs and enabling managers to take meaningful, tangible actions that help enhance the employee experience. By combining talent and workforce management into one unified system, retailers can bridge the gap between the back office and the front office to help better manage their retail operations and adapt to changing consumer, workforce, and business demands.

Hari Dorai, VP of HR Operations, Systems, and Analytics at PVH Corporation, discussed how PVH Corp, parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, with 31,000 employees and 6,000 retail stores globally, implemented Workday to achieve goals such as delivering a digital transformation for an improved associate experience, efficient HR services, compliance, and standardized processes while maintaining brand identity. PVH is decentralized, requiring a global template to ensure consistency in compensation, performance, and talent management across markets. After a few years into their Workday journey, Hari explains, they started focusing on analytics and evaluated tools that were tightly integrated with Workday and that allowed them to pull non-Workday data sources. They used Workday's PRISM to bring all the data together and invested in people analytics, which helped them identify areas for deeper analysis. His team used statistical tools to do further analysis of existing information, and used tools like Discovery Board and dashboards to deliver the information. Analytics revealed high risk of attrition among working parents, leading to the creation of programs for them. HR data was also combined with store performance data to draw insights. Dorai suggests spending time thinking about the approach and architecture of analytics, as the opportunities are endless once the infrastructure is in place.

“The global pandemic and current labor shortages are driving new expectations for frontline workers. Organizations that listen to the needs and expectations of frontline workers, empower them with the tools to do their jobs, and support them when it matters most will increase their ability to attract, support, and retain this critical segment of the workforce. Workday continues to invest heavily in the retail industry with solutions that help retailers drive deeper financial insight and organizational flexibility, manage their frontline talent, and support future growth.” said Nancy Weitl, VP, product management, workforce, Workday.