Retail industry has to cope with specific employee attendance, so it’s not easy for companies in this business to find the right time and attendance management system to fulfil their needs. What is the standard in retail attendance and how can it be easily managed in contemporary cloud system? We gave it a thought.
Retail is typically not an early adopter of trends in attendance and HR management digitisation. They are somewhere in the middle with most of the companies, which is not a criticism. As expected, early adopters are IT companies, which comes from their core as trendsetters, even in HR area. Retail companies are more conservative, but they have a good reason to be. What are the specifics of their employee attendance?
What are the specifics of retail’s employee attendance?
To name a few key differences of retail attendance:
Those are the reason why most retail companies still prefer old-school approach to HR and attendance management. Paper and hardware punch in/out systems seem more reliable for them, no matter how problematic they are at digital era.
However, this industry keeps getting deeper and deeper involved in digital revolution. That’s why in TULIP, we have approached the industry and have developed features in the platform that will cover retail time and attendance to the last point.
How can retail company manage employees’ attendance in TULIP?
Shift planning
Retail requires fast, flexible and user-friendly shift scheduling interface.
With TULIP, you can plan shifts in long and in short terms – weekly, monthly or yearly. The plan is attractive and clear and it provides automatic legislation checks. The plan and real attendance data are separately manageable for proper comparison.
Teams and tags for employees’ qualification management
Your teams can be visually differentiated with colour palette for advanced overview.
The team leader can prepare custom tags and allocate them to employees. It may cover their language or technical skills to make sure that each shift has qualified employees in the store.
Vacation planning and absence management
Absence management with approval flows are core in every time and attendance management system. TULIP is not an exception. Store manager can have an overview of the whole team, approve their absence and check the balance.
Vacation can be planned without binding for the whole year in separate “vacation planner”, which is available for the whole team and in which employees can see colleagues’ plans in real time. No need of unnecessary emails/meetings/phone calls.
Automatic legislation checks and data export for payroll calculation
Each attendance request and shift plan is automatically checked by legislation requirements. TULIP will not allow user to set up longer vacation than current balance, it will not allow to plan a shift without mandatory break, it does not allow overlays and more. Legislation is no longer your concern. Let TULIP take care of it.
Availability in different countries and cross-country approval
TULIP is serving to clients in almost 40 countries and your company attendance is not a problem for the system in case you have teams mixed among different countries. Approval flow allows cross-country management, including local legislation coverage.
Do you want TULIP T&A in your store? Ask us for demo session to discuss all the features:
TULIP serves to banks, retail chains and IT giants in many countries. Nobody wants to burden their employees with attendance management more than it’s necessary. That’s why they are searching for new ways of automation and simplification. Join them and manage your attendance easily in TULIP.
How does retail chain PEPCO uses TULIP?
European fashion and household retail chain PEPCO covers 16 countries on the old continent. In all of them, TULIP is a key tool for internal processes for 23 thousand employees. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, all PEPCO’s stores use TULIP for employees‘ time and attendance management, shift planning and more operations. Read the case study and their evaluation of our cooperation:
In an interview with the Czech magazine, our managing director Viktor spoke also about the retail attendance. We’ve picked two of his answers that may help you understand why and how the digitization of time and attendance agenda is a huge benefit for such robust companies like retail chains.
The early adopters in the digitization of employee attendance are probably IT companies, which by the very nature of business are reaching for the latest trends. How are retail chains, healthcare, and similar industries doing?
“Yes, it’s like that. In IT, they are the first to rush into the digitization of the HR agenda. This is because employees are more open to change, also because IT has an enormous shortage of people and companies are doing the impossible to attract them. Dismantling the administration is one of them.
Retail, healthcare, or the non-profit sector are in the second wave. There are a majority of such companies and organizations. They have complex working hours, and divisions of teams, and they have to plan shifts, a large part of them are seasonal workers, and for this reason, they lean more towards the old-world approach to HR and attendance. They still trust paper and physical terminals more. To this day, large hospitals, as well as European business chains, solve attendance with Excel. But it is changing. We have large retail clients and they are very open to moving to the cloud.”
Covid has radically affected retail. Are these companies now investing in attendance and HR systems?
„It depends on which and investing in what. Indeed, they do not use a home office, so replacing the attendance system with a cloud one does not stem from this, unlike other industries. Retail needs fast, flexible and user-friendly shift planning. Often, the store’s attendance is handled by the manager, who only informs the employees at the store about the planned shifts. We therefore do not try to e.g. digitize leave approval within the store as it makes no sense. We want to help the store manager to streamline his work with the attendance of all store employees, communication with the head office, and significantly speed up the preparation of payroll documents. TULIP helps them with this. Of course, the basis is the registration and approval of vacations, sick leaves and other absences.”
