Shopify POS: How to Easily Schedule Your Team On Multiple Locations
Being the owner of a store with several locations might bring some issues or complications in the leadership part, specifically when it comes to scheduling, assigning, and managing team members from different locations. To help you with all these tasks, this article shares staff scheduling and managing tips along with an amazing tool recommended to keep your management effort at its lowest, making your experience easier and more convenient.
How do you manage a team in multiple locations?
It's not easy to change from a single location to a several-location business structure. Even though acquiring more offices means business growth, responsibilities increase as well. One of the main challenges of having a store with various locations is the underestimation of the extra work, time, and money taken by the managers of a business. Not being prepared for the amount of work is one of the most common struggles.
How do you engage with employees in multiple locations?
When there are multiple teams in different locations, careful planning is absolutely needed if you want to keep your team members engaged. If you are not often seeing your employees, keeping control of them might get a bit hard.
Trusting your staff is crucial for creating a steadily easygoing work environment, but clear and constant communication is necessary too.
A nice solution for employee engagement across a range of workplaces is inspiring an organizational culture, in which individual and collective contribution is recognized and rewarded. You can create a monthly bonus scheme among all locations, where the best individual and group performance is rewarded for their efforts.
How do you manage distance from a team?
If for some reason it's impossible for you to handle the in-store management responsibilities at one of your offices, you can always schedule remote supervision. Clearly describe your team the strategic planning approaches so everyone is on the same page and objectives are achieved at their fullest.
If it is time to start with an established goal, you must set the team goal from the beginning, clarify responsibilities, and create standard procedures for the most complicated tasks. Let your team members know that if they need any guidance, there will always be someone there to help them.
However, you cannot be prepared for every single challenge that may arise, so here's a list of useful tips to enhance your multiple locations store management experiences:
Implement standard processes and systems in all of your locations
Although different stores can be part of the same business and perform the exact same tasks, each location has its own uniqueness. Successful management requires consistent execution of standard operating procedures throughout all locations of the company.
In terms of personnel management, it is recommended that the team receives the same employee handbook containing your company's policy and employee behavior expectations. Also, that the same shift structure is assigned to each one of them, and finally, that they receive the same training. As a result, workers will find it easier to move from one location to another.
Use a staff scheduling and management system
Keeping a schedule and controlling the organization's management system is a tricky task for many supervisors when it comes to multiple offices. However, having an accessible tool for everyone within your organization, that's also user-friendly and stores all of your business' data right into its server, reduces the effort needed. Scheduling software help employers to improve the shift's accuracy and makes sure team members are exactly where they should be.
Centralize all your information
Keeping all of your offices' data stored in the same server is one of the best practices a retail store owner can implement. This way, each one of the locations will be able to access every piece of information available at any time, being those customers profiles, current inventory, staff members details, etc.
Maintain a recurring evaluation of your retail stores
Properly managing multiple teams at your different locations will help you inspire teamwork within your company. In order to achieve this, you need to be constantly supervising and evaluating each one of your offices, while also keeping your team members engaged. You can delegate this task by assigning a shift supervisor to each location, who will make sure everyone complies with their schedules.
Another good idea for building trust and employee motivation is healthy competition. This can be accomplished by rewarding employees who reach specific sales goals. It's recommended to develop a management structure that outlines clear command chains and boundaries for each task. You can create a specific structure to avoid confusion among the team. Always remember that as long as you have an effective team working towards the company's goals, there's no impossible task to achieve.
Practice the art of delegation
As mentioned before, when your business starts growing, management responsibilities multiply too, along with your team members. Some managers tend to keep doing everything themselves, however, there's an easier path to take when duties get wild. You can delegate management assignments that require your physical presence to an assistant manager or shift supervisor. This way, your employees will have a local line leader who is capable of handling smaller issues when no manager is available.
Do not underestimate your staff's capabilities. Many local workers can handle all their work efficiently in their respective offices and take care of their location-specific tasks, even when there's no manager around to guide them.
Communicate and share
Choose one main communication channel and use it in a consistent way, this will allow you to manage teams of more than one location through the same channel, including of course remote workers if there are any. You can schedule weekly team meetings too, in order to keep an eye on your team across multiple locations. Having a specific communication channel for your team members also allows you to assign tasks on short notice and keep an active interest inside your team.
Additionally, if staff members are periodically rotated between locations, they can get to know every member of the team including managers and owners. This makes it easier to move staff around at short notice to cover shifts at other branches, so employee favoritism is avoided. Employees will also obtain a more personalized experience, allowing them to become familiar with each location and creating an atmosphere of collaboration among the people working in the company.
Be present
As the manager of multiple locations, your role cannot be greater with one location than the others, you should keep a steady presence across your other locations. This might mean visiting and evaluating each location at least once a week. It will take an extra effort on your part to get in contact regularly, but it is surely worth it.
Not being an absent manager is easier said than done, and if for some reason you're not able to travel to meetings, you can always hold regular Skype meetings, conference calls, delegate the same functions to an assistant manager, etc. Keep in mind that, if you manage multiple locations, your team needs to know you're present.
Now that you're familiar with the previous tips, it's time to talk about a way to make employee scheduling easy. There is no doubt that having a management system is essential, but which is the right one for you?
EasyTeam
Let's talk about a tool that may become one of your best allies for any staff management and scheduling task. EasyTeam is currently rated as one of the leading Shopify POS apps for retailers. The reason for this is that it has been designed specifically to make the job of managers easier when it comes to employee scheduling and organization. This highly-rated app offers a unique set of features that might make it stand out above many other management systems, but this post will focus only on the Staff feature.
As soon as you've added all of your team members to EasyTeam's database, you can begin creating shifts for them. Upon entering the app, you'll see a bar for selecting the Schedules section, followed by a calendar where you can create, edit, and delete shifts. You can also find tutorials to learn how to use this feature. The following image shows what the Schedules page looks like.
Scheduling Shifts
First of all, you need to select a staff member and a specific day to create a new shift.
After clicking on Create Shift, a pop-up window will appear so you can add the beginning and ending hours or modify the shift date, just like this:
Additionally, you can drag and drop shifts around the calendar in case you added them to the wrong person or date:
It is important to highlight that, given its integration with the Shopify POS, EasyTeam also provides a group of tiles you can easily add to your smart grid. Here's how you can do it:
On the main screen of the Shopify POS, click on Add tile > Apps > Staff Management - EasyTeam:
Then, select which tiles you'd like to add to your POS, in this case, View/Edit Schedules:
And just with a few clicks, you have all the power of scheduling integrated right into your Shopify POS system.
Final Thoughts
Knowing the difficulties of supervising different teams in multiple locations might help the ones in charge of personnel as long as they prepare for the most demanding tasks. But being prepared is not enough when you don't have a proper tool to complete the management assignments.
With EasyTeam integrated into Shopify POS, you have the ability to make instant adjustments to your staff's schedules both in-store (through the POS system) and remotely by signing in to EasyTeam's site and making all the changes needed. This turns out to be really helpful to control and oversee your complete workforce whenever you want, even if some of them are remote teams. All of the things listed above demonstrate EasyTeam's ability to handle and enhance staff management in an exhaustive manner.
