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by Aware
Understanding the drivers behind frontline employee turnover has challenged retailers for years. Using Aware, industry leaders are now hearing what their people think for the first time.
Getting authentic feedback from frontline employees is not a new challenge. For retailers, however, it is an urgent one. Industry turnover has exceeded 60% for years, and half of frontline workers will quit within their first 120 days. The cost to the enterprise in sourcing, training, and replacing thousands of workers each year cannot be overstated and represents a massive unmitigated expense in an industry that survives on razor-thin margins.
Traditional business hierarchies often prevent executives from hearing feedback from the front lines, leaving them blind to the issues having the greatest impact on employees’ day-to-day work lives. Employees may also be reluctant to share authentic feedback with managers and leaders if they think that feedback would be unwelcome—for example, if it involves criticizing a new product or initiative, or questioning established policies and procedures.
Aware helps business leaders overcome these objections and tap into the real thoughts and feelings of frontline employees by analyzing trends in workplace chat platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Workplace from Meta. Here, employees discuss more freely issues and concerns they face at work, filling those conversations with incredible insights into every aspect of the organization and its culture.
However, even here employees may hold back from discussing the most frustrating or sensitive parts of their jobs. To uncover those insights, leaders must look beyond the walls of the business, to anonymous public forums where employees can freely speak their minds.
Gaining a 360-Degree View of Employee Feedback
An organization can only operate at the highest level if it develops a centralized nervous system or real-time feedback loop to understand what is happening at every level of the business. Aware provides that feedback loop, combining insights from multiple pieces of unstructured data in one centralized platform.
Using industry-leading, proprietary natural language processing designed and trained specifically on short-form, chatty collaboration conversations like those found in Slack, Teams, and Workplace, Aware extracts authentic, actionable insights from employee voices at scale. Now, Aware’s technology can extract those same insights from anonymous conversations on social media forums like Reddit and Fishbowl, answering questions such as:
- What are the top trending themes discussed over the past month?
- What underlying issues dominating frontline conversations aren’t being surfaced at the executive level?
- What is the sentiment and health of employee communications over time?
- What specific actions taken by the company led to increases or decreases in sentiment?
- What are employees looking for from their leaders?
Extracting Next-Generation Insights from Unstructured Data
Aware is a powerful engine capable of ingesting unstructured collaboration data from multiple sources to give organizations the centralized nervous system it needs to make informed decisions at every level. Using Aware’s technology, retailers can access the unfiltered voice of the employee from wherever employees choose to speak, opening a direct line from the front line and getting real-time insights into the subjects that really matter.
Those insights are already helping innovative leaders to drive transformative change and address areas of greatest confusion, such as how to handle exceptions to common policies and procedures. Executives can also understand how employees see the company and its leadership and adjust messaging to better address their needs and concerns.
The Retail Workplace Trends Report, Aware’s groundbreaking analysis of thousands of anonymous frontline employee conversations, showed that what workers wanted above all else was to feel like their leaders had their backs, especially when dealing with combative customers. By identifying pain points within their own organization, retail leaders can use Aware to give employees the support they need.
Read the report now.
Overcoming the Great Attrition
There’s truth in the saying that employees don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers. For too long, the adage that “the customer is always right” has turned the retail sector into an industry that puts its people last. Today, there is growing understanding that the employees on the front lines are a business’s best asset—as well as its public face—and their insights are immensely valuable to the executives who can access them. Thanks to Aware, those insights are more accessible today than ever before, empowering leaders to reimagine how their businesses run. Instead of alienating employees, they are elevating their voices and giving them the support they need to thrive.
