How is a Store Staffed Correctly?

Retail is a seven day a week business, so it comes as no surprise that staff management and retention places as the number one concern for most heads of retail operations. I placed a poll on my LinkedIn page in early November and was slightly shocked by the landslide result, with over 50% of participants voting for staffing. Other options included keeping conversions high, implementing new technologies, and maintaining shelf availability. But in a sense, all the above work in tandem with effective staff management.

Both staff management and retention have come up as primary concerns at this year’s Retail Technology Show in London and at the National Retail Federation in New York. Even at this year’s Retail Excellence Ireland Retail Retreat, Jean McCabe’s opening panel discussion very quickly turned into a conversation on staff retention. With bigger demands on stores amidst tightening budgets, retail operations have never been under as much pressure to ensure a store’s staff roster is correct and in-check.

Any retail operations professional will happily tell you how many responsibilities the job entails, whether it’s inventory, store readiness, visual merchandising, shelf availability, promotions, staff rostering, hiring and training, opening/closing, attending to customers, whilst also dealing with any unforeseen issues like lateness’s/absences, spills, store systems temporarily ceasing, and anything and everything which inhibits a smooth operation.

But how does a store manager know if their store is being staffed correctly?

With the above-mentioned issues, ensuring the right number of staff are in a store is only half the battle. The next challenge is to ensure that each are engaged in tasks which are leading to maximised sales opportunities. Are the correct items out on the shelf, and are the shelves stocked at the right times? Which items are front and centre and which are placed in less obvious places? This can lead to frustration on the shopper’s behalf and if there aren’t enough staff working on the floor, there may be no way for the shopper to procure these items themselves. 

In a 2022 Forbes study, Tracey Bower investigated staffing in brick-and-mortar retail environments. She concluded that “Understaffing is not good for business. In practical terms, understaffing means that employees likely have to work longer hours and/or take on additional projects and priorities outside their job description – usually with no extra pay.” She says the end result of this will be low morale, burnout, and ultimately high turnover. In the study, it is stated that at the time, 22% of workers felt that they had too much work to do, while 30% felt they had heavy work loads in general. Half of all retailer workers surveyed felt their store was understaffed. 

One of the best ways to combat this is to arm managers with access to live store data.  Even something as simple as week-on-week footfall/conversion figures can direct managers on how to utilise their floor staff. This can become even more valuable with departmental footfall and conversion. More than ever, real-time data tracking is one of the most important components of efficient shop-floor management. This means setting up systems that automatically capture and display data from shop floors and making sure that staff are focused on the right tasks to meet the stores needs. 

Managing those tasks around store footfall is usually the best approach and one that can be seriously taken for granted. On Melissa Moore’s Retail Tea Break Podcast in September of 2025, store traffic expert Mark Ryski stated that the Field of Dreams type philosophy of “If they come, they will buy” is a false assumption. He went on to say that retailers need to understand the true importance of their store traffic and likens it to a precious non-renewable resource. 

There is a strong argument to be made that staff autonomy costs a store money. When staff are idle, it’s likely that key tasks are being ignored. Staff may think a certain routine task is essential to store ops, but they may be missing out on earning more money for the store at the end of the day. Simply having staff available on the floor will prompt shoppers to ask for assistance, which in turn could encourage them to buy more on that trip and gain a better overall impression. 

Speaking with Rethink Retail’s Top Expert Renee Hartmann recently, she believes that one of the ways retail operations professionals could make marginal gains is by 

“Freeing up staff from doing certain unimportant tasks and ensure they are focusing on the customer” 

In addition to maintaining the right level of inventory at the right location and right time, retailers also need to match labour supply to incoming customer traffic to provide the right service level to their customers. Matching labour supply to customer demand can be challenging as customer traffic varies significantly across hours-of-day, days-of-a-week, and months-of-a-year.

When it comes to staffing, there can be a temptation to rely heavily on a store’s standard operating procedures as a guideline for staff activities. Updating the SOP can also be seen as a proactive way to align all staff in their shared duties. While this is of course a great starting point and a time-honoured way of keeping the team moving, it fails to treat each day as an opportunity to enhance revenue. 

Questions like “What’s the best staff to shopper ratio for the best possible service?”, “How many managers should be on duty during a shift?”, “How often should staff schedules be reviewed?”, “What happens to customer satisfaction if there aren't enough staff?”, can only be answered by analysing raw in-store data. Without this, most SOP’s will lead to underutilised staff and subsequently leaving money on the table for the retailer. 

Staff need to be on hand to open an extra till if it’s deemed necessary. Long lines can dishearten a shopper, making them feel unimportant and therefore and make them feel the store is not worthy of their purchase and that they should take their money elsewhere. Their desire to come back to the store would be affected and they would essentially with their wallet, abstaining from purchasing at one establishment and rewarding another store with their hard-earned money. 

If you’re a retail operations professional with the responsibility of staffing a store, there are easy measures to counteract a random assortment of labour. Real time tracking data enables stores to see their weekly spikes in activity, along with their products which benefit the most from this data. If stock is flying off the shelves, it’s important that 

those areas are restocked before they start to hit their highest daily conversions.

Mark Ryski mentioned that in his experience speaking to retailers, around half across the USA tend to have detailed in-store shopper and make it a priority to understand and utilise this data to improve store operations, from staffing, merchandising, and A/B testing any shop decisions. While the other half tend to think that in-store data won’t tell them anything they don’t already know. 

It would be churlish to ignore staff workloads of course, as nobody on a shop floor should be responsible for each and every task. But ensuring staff to footfall ratio is always organised effectively will lower the risks of burnout and keep staff morale and store conversions high. Teams will feel better organised when they’re more attuned to the shopper demand and hopefully those shoppers will continue to spend day-on-day, week-on-week.