New Staff More Problems

You always hope when you start a business that one day the business will have grown big enough that you can have assistants and managers at every level in each department to handle daily crises. I’m sure I will get there, but right now I’m the manager at almost every department and it can be pretty exhausting to handle every day issues while also stepping back to look at the bigger picture.

Right now I have a sales staff problem, and I’m wondering if there is some annual trend to this. Last year, around this time, both my sales staff did a no-show for a few days. It was exactly two weeks before my wedding, and I was working on the Spring Collection launch for 2009. I found it stressful to manage the store by myself, plan the photoshoot and send out press kits and mailers, and spend time with my wedding guests who were starting to arrive. I promised myself I would rather bear the cost of hiring extra staff than go through that stress again.

So I went and hired more sales staff, because even though my store is just 250 square feet small, I need to account for absenteeism and hope that on any given day at least 2 of them will show up for work. Accepting the overhead cost (this includes a fee that the recruitment agency charges every time I hire a new sales person through them) is not the hardest part. The tough part is training, and re-training, and trying to maintain some standards without staying in the shop myself. And just when I think my staff have understood me and my nit-picky ways, just when I get comfortable spending just a couple of hours in the store everyday and devoting the rest of my time to production, designing and marketing ideas, 3 out of my 5 sales staff decide to quit on me.

One of them is getting married, and her family demands that she go home right away to prepare for the wedding that is two months away. One of them joined work only two months ago and she has to leave because her parents cannot take care of her 18 month old child while she is at work. The third one actually joined in December, took a 3 week sick leave on her first day of work to recover from typhoid, and now has to quit because her father is unwell and she has to go home to look after him. This is a woman’s life in most families I suppose: if you are not answerable to your father, then it’s your husband and then your kids and then again your parents.

I had a 3 day vacation planned for my husband and I (it’s our first year anniversary and I think a few vacations days in a year is not too much to ask for) and now instead of focusing all my energies on marketing and press for my latest Spring Collection before my vacation, I have to interview new candidates for a sales position and train them too before I take off for 3 days.

Is there any real solution to this problem? The recruitment agency who sends me candidates says that every store has this same issue and that retail doesn’t have the same power of retention that an office job has. I realize it when I interview candidates too- very few of them hold one job for more than a year before jumping on to the next one. One candidate I interviewed but did not hire told me she loved all her jobs but she left because she wanted to move on to something better. I asked why I should hire her, spend time training her when she is going to move onto “something better” after a year. She answered saying, “how else can I get a salary increase and better my life”? Would she rather jump from job to job (telling her new employer what her old salary was so that she starts off the new job with a higher pay) than stick with the old one and keep earning raises and promotions?

It’s all a big mystery to me and I hope that I come back from my vacation rejuvenated enough to start the whole process of training again. But first, I have two candidates lined up for interviews this morning.