Re-imagining the Future of Work in Retail

We know that things are changing rapidly, and our world is a different place than it was just two months ago. When I think about what I’ve been going through personally in this lock-down period, working remote is much nicer and it's fun when you have an "option". However, WFH as a mandatory full-time way, can challenge us as humans because we are hardwired for connection. Though we have all our family around us, the one funny anecdote that everybody talks about is the “battle of the bandwidth”.

Just to set the stage, as we see things evolve, we see three phases. The first phase was all about crisis response, where each of us were in some sense digital first responders to all our employees and customers in our environment.

As a next phase, when we see ourselves coming out of this crisis, Work from Home will move to Hybrid. However, it’s not going to be a switch, it’s going to be more of a dial. One of the things during the Hybrid infrastructure will be Remote everything. The Digital Infrastructure will not be just remote work, but remote sales, customer service, operations, everything.

And finally in the long term, when Covid 19 is behind us, there will be systemic changes. Many new scenarios which will come to life, post crisis will drive higher productivity. Leading with going digital, enabling ecommerce, just in time pick ups, crowd-sourcing customer response, etc.

To understand the implication in the workplace in Retail industry, we've looked at 6 scenarios which we feel are pivotal-

(A) Enable people and teams to collaborate and be productive from anywhere (B) Training firstline workers on new policies and how to operate and interact with customers safely. (C) Manage everyday operations such as shifts and task management (D)  Manage and secure access to apps, data, and devices (E) Rapidly adapt your business processes (F) Choosing the right devices to ensure higher productivity.

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Let's go a little deeper into each of these.

(A) Enable people and teams to collaborate and be productive from anywhere: The first pillar is of collaboration, a critical need in this period of Social Distancing. Also, how can one be productive from anywhere, given the fact that not everybody was ready to take this plunge. Let’s break this into 2 parts-

Culture and community: The need for us as humans to remain connected is paramount. It’s imperative to maintain morale and keep your employees connected to the leadership through these tough timed. Using modern social and engagement platforms we can ensure messages are heard, leadership is visible and best practices are shared to keep the organization vibrant and agile. Microsoft Teams saw a phenomenal uptake with more than 75 Mn daily active users and 200 Mn participants. Live broadcasts from leadership to ensure visibility and reassurance, creating a sense of community with close knit team huddles, has helped remove the feeling of isolation..

Collaboration and Access to Content: Communicating in a timely manner from the CSuite through to the First Line itself. Using chat and urgent messaging to contact employees directly without the need of mobile numbers in an asynchronous manner is very useful. A unique scenario was the Use of Company Communicator App to push out messages.

(B) Training firstline workers: One of the things which is paramount in every consumers mind right now would be safety and hygiene for every retail visit that they make. Ensuring “Standard Operating Procedures” at all outlets at all points of time and publishing these on Teams, remotely inspecting this via a 2 way feedback channel would become a necessity as we move along. Skilling and training the employees on these new skills would be critical, in addition, these would need to be very frequent.

 Coming to Trainings, Creating and Publishing videos is indeed simple. You can do this by yourself sitting at home and publishing this on Microsoft Teams. You can do live events for all your employees, which can be recorded and viewed on demand. Finally, any new employee can be onboard remotely by providing them instant access to information

(C) Manage everyday operations via shifts and task management: Enabling frontline managers and workers to set shift schedules, request time off and adjust shits through a self-service experience reduces cost and time for shift management. What was in the past a rigid and legacy experience, usually based on ad-hoc email communication for requests and shift changes, can now be a fluid experience for all.

Everyday operations can now be down remote and effectively on Microsoft Teams. Use secure video calling to run remote store visits. Push tasks to store colleagues so they can action and delegate activities. Employees can view upcoming shifts, request to swap and/or pick up a shift, and see who else is scheduled for the day.

Shifts enables Firstline managers to plan schedules in an employee self-service and integrated experience. They can create, update and distribute schedules for teams in addition to broadcast open and unfilled shifts so that other employees can cover them. For Firstline employees, they can swap/offer shifts and request time off from right from their phones.

(D) Manage and secure access to apps, data, and devices: Let’s move to one of the fundamental needs which is to Manage and secure access to apps, data, and devices in the most efficient way.

Securely enabling access to company resources is top of mind for every customer. Organizations are struggling to move from their existing VPN constrained models. Additionally, the cyber attack landscape is shifting as bad actors exploit COVID-19 themes and VPN vulnerabilities making security even more important. We also know that it is challenging to onboard and manage new and personal devices

We have been looking at address these problems in a few ways-

• You can easily enable remote access to applications – both cloud apps (like O365, Salesforce, Drop Box, etc) and on prem web apps without the need for VPN with Azure AD
• Once apps are connected you can easily give users visibility to their apps and a simple way to get access to them with the MyApps portal
• Working remotely not only makes in person connection within your company challenging – you also need to collaborate with your business partners and contractors. Azure AD can also enable secure connections with other businesses
• Securing access is critical. With Azure AD conditional access you can apply security policies to ensure only the right people have access to the right apps under the right circumstances
• Conditional access can also extend this protection to devices protecting data in apps and on devices.

(D) Rapidly adapt your business processes : Next, moving on to the need of making the best use of your data and extending processes. Here’s where Power Platform is changing the paradigm in the future.

First: Power Apps is the low code application development platform that spans Azure, O365 and D365 as well as stand alone applications, empowering everyone, whether a citizen developer, an IT admin or a Pro Dev to collaborate and solve business problems and innovate faster. You can easily streamline processes and convert manual processes to becoming paperless with Power Apps in Microsoft Teams

Second: Having visibility to activities across teams can be challenging. Bring in your data with over 300+ built in connectors or on premise data sources, leverage AI Builder for insights and engage your partners and customers through Portals.

Third: When working remotely, it’s important to have aligned goals. Consolidate data, embed dashboards with insights and drive data driven culture with Power BI within Microsoft Teams

(E) Choosing the right devices to ensure higher productivity: Our today’s reality is different from what it was a few month ago, and we have to find ways to still deliver optimally. A recent Gartner article highlights that one of the key aspects of managing a remote workforce is enabling your employees with the right infrastructure, that goes beyond just a functioning laptop.

An ideal device should enable the workers to be: More productive, Enable collaboration with internal and external stakeholders, Keep the business sanctity intact with superior enterprise-grade security. Microsoft Surface for Business devices empower sales floor staff, managers and customer service representatives with the right information at the right time. Surface devices are slim, light, powerful and secure, and feature elegant design and rugged build quality that can stand up to the rigors of retail—and look great doing so.

Let us take an example of retail store managers and see how Surface could help them deliver to their highest potential. Surface can help the store managers improve the way they manage staff and merchandising operations. They can run Microsoft StaffHub, Excel, and other LOB apps concurrently and without lag via 10th Gen Intel® Core™ processors. They can detach the type cover* to quickly convert to tablet mode if they need to run onto the retail floor. Device can be carried around for long periods of time without hassle and they can work the entire shift with a battery that lasts up to 13 hours.

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As a closing note, the last 2 months has been a constant learning curve and a journey for us to learn more towards how we can partner with our customers and partners better in this space. What are some of the things you are hearing? What are the ways in which you are creating new transformational practices? Please do share.