Human resource (HR) management is fundamental to building any company. For over 70 years, the most respected business experts and writers have been emphatic that HR is management's primary responsibility. None the less, most likely if you are in management, you do not allocate your time or company resources in proportion to the importance of HR.
Peter Drucker, in The Practice of Management, wrote extensively on the importance of training the unit manager or "train the trainer." This book is universally considered the most important writing on business in the last fifty years. Other works devoted to the importance of HR include Built to Last, Managing in a Time of Great Change, and Jack Welch's recent book Jack Welch & the GE Way.
So often we see retailers that invest daily in almost every other retail process but pay little attention to HR. Employees, more recently, have been designated as "the customer within." Serve those customers well and they will serve your customers projecting a more positive attitude with uncommon dedication and loyalty. Frederick Reichheld, in The Loyalty Effect, documented the importance of this sensibility and linked it to companies that were consistent, top performers in many, diverse industries. Across many industries, in this high performance group, each company was quite unique in most aspects from others in the group. The single quality they all shared was the focus on and dedication to the customer within.
Do you allocate the time and resources to your people as you do buying, merchandising, promotion, store visuals, etc, etc? And so it goes, routinely the largest expense on the income statement and the greatest corporate resources are subordinated to issues of lesser importance. Meaningful HR programs are not campaigns; they must be bone-deep and constant.
There are a number of the essential ingredients in any quality HR program. Three that we often find are missing in many retailers are:
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Pace has extensive experience in retail HR management, especially at the contact staff and store management levels, those that interact with your customers. We have developed detailed retail training programs with Times Mirror, a Fortune 200 company, the largest corporate training company in the world.