Retail Management: When, Why and How to Hold a Meeting with Your Team

Whether it is to discuss a new promotion, train on new products, to review new operations practices or to pump-up the team for a big selling day, often the best way to get retail employees on the same page is by holding a store meeting.   

Now we have all been in bad meetings that seem to go on and on while providing little value to the business.  So here are some tips that will help you to improve the quality of your meetings.

When to Have a Store Meeting

As retail training consultants, we often advocate that our clients should have regularly scheduled meetings with their store-level team members.  These fall into the following categories:

·        Monthly planning and training meeting – A one-hour meeting that focuses on how the store will attain its sales target for the upcoming month. 

·        Weekly sales and training meetings – The other 3 or 4 weeks of the month you should conduct a 30-minute meeting focused on helping the store in attaining its targets

·        Daily sales huddles – these are 5-10 minute meetings held at the beginning of each shift that are focused on recognition, the day’s selling activities and work assignments.

The key is to make your retail store meetings productive and fun.  Every team member should want to attend them – either because they will be recognized for an accomplishment, learn something new or help their team to achieve target – and that leads us to our next topic…

Why You Should Have a Meeting

Having a meeting for the meeting’s sake is a waste of everyone’s time and your money.  Therefore you should make sure that you have planned your meeting ahead of time to accomplish some specific goals.  Your agenda should always include:

·        Recognizing contributors and leaders

·        Setting team goals and priorities

·        Communicating policy or operational changes

·        Training on products or skills

Of course one of the things that we hear in our retail sales management training seminars is that store owners and managers do not always have time for holding meetings.  This is usually a result of poor planning, attending poor meetings in the past, or trying to do it all yourself.

How to Execute a Retail Store Meeting

Every good meeting begins with a great agenda and even better planning.  But to make these happen, you need to know what your desired outcome is.  Do you want to improve selling or customer service behaviour on the floor?  Do you want to make sure that team members are operationally compliant?  Or maybe you want to improve product knowledge. 

Once you have set your goals, you can write your agenda and then assign meeting topics to your team members.  To make sure it is a productive meeting you should:

·        Communicate your agenda in advance

·        Assign meeting segments to team members

·        Have retail employees review their information with you ahead of time

·        Prepare your hand outs or job aids

Having your team members conduct the meeting is a great way to encourage them to become product experts, operations experts or experts on other topics.  This saves you time now and down the road as your team members will now view that employee as a resource.

Upon opening your meeting make sure you recognize your individual contributors.  You should close your meeting with a recap of what was learned and with a quick goal setting session.  Once the meeting is over, take time to follow up on any concerns or questions brought up by the staff. 

Are you looking for ways tom improve the productivity of your retail team?  The experts at Retail Training Services can help you with on-site consultation and on-site and computer-based training programs.  Contact us to start the process rolling!