Organized trade, worker turnover towards a record 40%

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In three years, turnover (staff turnover) in organized retail is destined to exceed, on average, a rate of 40%. A forecast that generates considerable concern in large chains, especially due to the ongoing misalignment of job supply and demand which, by now, does not spare any sector. Hence the “increasingly strong attention to organizational issues and the strengthening of human resources management, where today there is a ratio of 15 employees for every thousand employees, therefore equal to 1.5%, fivefold compared to a few years ago when it was 0.3%. With a strong vertical specialization and people dedicated to recruiting, training, insertion”, says Davide Pellegrini, an economist from the University of Parma who together with Francesco Massara, who teaches marketing at Iulm, carried out research for Confimprese and Largo Consumo where work in organized retail is told. This is the most significant subset of trade, where, according to Istat data, there are over 3 million workers.

The criticality of turnover

The research, entitled Retail people track, took place in two phases: the first, carried out by IULM, involved 3,260 workers, trying to understand their age, type of contract and salary. The second, managed by the University of Parma, instead measured the organizational effectiveness and efficiency of the retailing head quarters. The most critical aspect is that of turnover which «requires a paradigm shift in people management: if until a few years ago human resources were considered important but not strategic due to the abundance of people on the market, now this is no longer the case, for multiple reasons ranging from demographics to work-life balance. And this involves greater attention in their management also to aspects of well-being and engagement”, says Massara.

The prevalence of women and young people among workers

Among workers there is a clear female predominance, with women representing 68%. The workforce is predominantly young: 82.39% of workers are under 45 and 53.40% are under 35. From an occupational point of view, 63.19% of those interviewed are employed as sales assistants, 20.28% manage the cash registers and 15.98% hold store manager roles. 60.52% of workers have a permanent contract. Industry experience varies greatly: only 21.20% of respondents have more than 10 years of retail experience. The majority of workers, over 90%, have a net salary ranging between 500 and 2 thousand euros per month. «A wide range due above all to the incidence of part time in the sector – observes Massara -. In particular, however, if we consider those with a permanent contract then the range is between one thousand and 2 thousand and if we only consider full time workers it goes from 1,500 to 2 thousand euros”. It should be noted that 7.48% of the sample is made up of “new Italians”, a figure that shows the cultural diversity that is establishing itself in the workforce and which will be increasingly necessary to deal with the mismatch between job supply and demand.

Changes in stress levels

Through a real barometer of the sales force, the researchers evaluated the well-being and stress of the workers, in addition to their engagement, which also shows a gender specificity: women in fact demonstrate greater motivation than men and third gender. Younger workers are especially affected most by working conditions, while there is a clear improvement among those over 46 or over 11 years of experience in the sector. In the South, work in retail arouses greater interest, perhaps due to a combination of environmental, economic, social and cultural factors, such as unemployment and the cost of living. The highest levels of engagement and the lowest levels of stress are found among store managers, while those who work at the checkouts or as sales assistants feel more work pressure. Furthermore, again with reference to engagement, permanent workers show a higher level than fixed-term workers. Another factor that clearly emerges is that work experience leads to a reduction in stress and an increase in engagement, especially after 10 years of experience. When it comes to stress, it also emerges that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between income and stress: engagement and well-being are optimal between 1,500 and 2,000 euros, but decrease above this threshold. Stressors include managing checkout lines, extending opening hours, store size, in-store congestion, and dealing with customer complaints.

Emerging trends in human resources management

Among the emerging trends, triggered by turnover and the costs involved, Pellegrini indicates «the attention to training and collaborations with ITS in order to deal with the lack of specialized profiles, the mobility between the store and the headquarters creating prospects of career, climate analyzes which were not done in the past but which are now a characteristic of all chains, the simplification of activities, greater time flexibility. Of course in Italy we are far from the experiments on the short week in retail that are being experimented in some Belgian chains and in some Northern European companies, but there is a significant improvement in working hours and, for example, also in the possibility of working split shifts , considering that in the sector people also work on Saturdays and Sundays.”