Guide

Empower Frontline Workers The secret to overcoming challenges in today’s retail and hospitality environment.

Empower Frontline Workers | 2

Retail and hospitality organizations face unprecedented inflation, margin pressures, and labor shortages. As these industries adapt to seismic shifts in consumer and guest behavior,

they must also contend with rising inflation, supply chain disruptions,

and labor market pressures brought on by recent geopolitical tensions and

macroeconomic forces.

In this challenging context, an engaged frontline workforce is critical to meeting

customer expectations, adjusting staffing to fluctuating productivity demands,

defending against margin pressures, and protecting your bottom line.

“At CarMax we have over 50% millennials in our workforce. So, these millennials are digital natives. They’re used to simple, easy technologies in their personal lives. So, when they come to work, they expect the same. Workday enabled us to give them the tools that are intuitive, simple, and seamless that our associates can love.”

Shamim Mohammad, Senior Vice President and CIO, CarMax Enterprise Services

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When workforce satisfaction goes up, costs go down. One out of every five U.S. workers is employed by the retail and hospitality

sector, and globally, the hospitality industry employs nearly 300 million workers.1

But research shows that the “quit rate” for this group in the United States is nearly

twice as high as the national average.2 Further, 56% of organizations are grappling

with frontline employee turnover that is higher than the historical average.3

This turnover factor, along with increased competition for talent (which companies

rate as their most significant struggle4), means that they must prioritize worker

engagement. An engaged workforce is much less likely to quit— driving retention

up, lowering costs associated with hiring and training, and easing these pressures

on leadership.

Turnover takes a toll beyond replacement cost and overtime—research shows

that turnover has a direct impact on store revenue, too. Consider:

• There is a 3% increase in sales in stores that have lower frontline turnover.

• Labor costs make up 85% of controllable costs in retail stores.

• Moving from the bottom quartile to the top quartile in multiple employee

experience metrics can increase revenue by nearly 50%.5

One thing is clear: elevating the employee experience (EX) for frontline workers

is critical for retail and hospitality success.

“We chose Workday as a transformative partner to help us understand our employees from a different perspective, treat them as individuals rather than as a group, and change our culture.”

Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Korean Air

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How can you engage your frontline employees while improving business operations?

Flexibility and control.

Give employees predictable schedules, predictable hours, and the

ability to choose the days when they work and the time they start

working, so you always have the right employee, at the right place,

at the right time.

Ongoing experiences.

Demonstrate your commitment to well-being by providing intuitive,

reliable opportunities for employees to provide feedback and receive

meaningful responses. Deliver employee journeys that cultivate

excellent talent, improve and track skills over time, and enrich workers’

relationship with the company.

Career development.

Recognize and address the different factors that lead to advancement

across demographics, age groups, and length of tenure. Use learning

and analytics to deliver personalized experiences to develop skills,

unlock potential, and drive workforce agility at scale.

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Empower your frontline workforce and watch your business thrive. The Workday workforce management solution provides the transparency and

flexibility your frontline workers want while giving management the control it

needs to optimize labor, lower costs, and rapidly respond to evolving business

and customer demands.

It’s a win for employees, management, and your bottom line. Workday’s modern workforce management applications:

• Enable workers and managers to track time, absences, accruals,

pay and more—quickly and accurately.

• Eliminate error-prone manual processes with global mobile and

web-based self-service access.

• Empower frontline workers to reskill, cross skill, and upskill with learning

and education content that supports their career journey and ambitions.

• Improve demand forecasting to accurately anticipate workforce needs and

increase profitability.

With Workday, employees have the power to set their shift and role preferences,

notify management about issues, swap shifts if things change, and take on

additional shifts if they want—all from their mobile device.

76% of employees look for another job opportunity when they don’t feel valued.

94% would stay longer if they believed their employer invested in them.2

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Proven value for your retail and hospitality operations. Optimize your workforce management investment by unifying your data and

processes into one technology platform. A single source of truth can simplify your

system, drive efficiencies, and enable better business outcomes.

Other vendors may offer a “single” solution, but often their platform incorporates

multiple third-party products and lacks cohesion. The Workday solution unlocks

added business value by incorporating all the tools you need into a truly unified

system. Increase your Workday footprint and improve flexibility, security, and the

employee experience.

Workday unified workforce management ecosystem

Outcomes that Increase Sales

Improved Manager Productivity

Improved Frontline Employee Productivity

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Outcomes that Control Cost

Technology Simplification

Reduced Voluntary Turnover

Optimized Labor Costs/ Scheduling

“In future acquisitions, we’ll use Workday to automatically assign new employees their proper organizations and reporting structures instead of taking weeks to do it manually.”

Aaron Colley, Workday Technology Lead and HR Solution Architect, Mondelēz International

“Mobile time tracking with Workday was a game-changer for us. Ninety-five percent of our user population uses the Workday mobile app to check in, check out, review their benefits, update their personal information, and do lots more.”

Gaurav Sharda, Director of Workday operations, Life Time

Learn more. To explore how Workday Workforce Management

can help you, please contact Sales at workday.com/contact

or call 877-967-5329.

http://workday.com/contact

Sources 1 Statista, “Number of travel and tourism jobs worldwide from 2019 to 2022, with a forecast for 2023”; 2023. 2 McKinsey, “The Great Attrition in frontline retail—and what retailers can do about it”; David Fuller, Bryan Logan, Aneliya Valkova; 2022. 3 Workday, “Empathy and Empowerment: The New Frontline Experience.”; 2022. 4 Ibid. 5 Harvard Business Review, “Research: How Employee Experience Impacts Your Bottom Line”; 2022.

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