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Do you have frequent employee turnover at your thrift store?
Many small businesses, including nonprofits, struggle to keep talent. But although this is a common issue, there are proven strategies to reverse the trend and encourage employees to stay.
Reducing employee turnover leads to consistency and quality service. When experienced employees stay in their positions, they acquire the expertise they need to best serve customers. Fewer new employees means less money spent on training.
Nonprofit workers often leave their jobs due to burnout. Heavy workloads, emotional toll, and relatively low (or no) pay can negatively affect a team member’s motivation.
But with the right management approach, you can address these issues and keep your employees committed to your organization in the long run.
In this blog, we’ll discuss seven tips to help you retain your thrift store’s employees, sustaining your business for years to come.
7 Practical Tips for Retaining Employees
Employees leave their jobs for many reasons — stagnation, dissatisfaction with pay, mistrust of management. By implementing these strategies, you can overcome these issues and build loyalty among your team members.
1. Hire Employees Who Believe in Your Mission
As a thrift store owner, you aren’t in it for the money. You do what you do to serve the community — providing more affordable options and giving new life to items that would overwise be thrown away. Employees are more likely to stay when they align with your thrift store’s mission, so look for candidates who support your cause.
Try to get a sense of this during the interview process. Ask candidates about their experiences with thrift stores — whether they shop at these establishments often, and if so, why. Their answers help you determine if they’re a good fit.
Remember: Even if someone doesn’t seem like an ideal candidate at first, they can become an exemplary employee with time. Teach them about your thrift store’s mission, show them how to help customers, and eventually they may become a great fit.
Don’t forget to remind current employees of your store’s mission. If they work with you long enough, they may forget the meaning behind their daily tasks.
Try pointing out specific examples of your store’s positive impact during team meetings. You might mention a family who found budget-friendly clothing items for each of their children, or highlight a couch or bookshelf you sold that would otherwise go to a landfill. Hearing these firsthand stories helps keep team members energized.
Related Read: How To Attract Volunteers to Your Thrift Store: 8 Steps
2. Compensate Employees Fairly
At a nonprofit, funds are tight. Your organization isn’t designed to make you and your employees rich, but rather to support you as you make a difference in the community. While your budget is limited, paying reasonable wages is essential to reducing employee turnover.
Although paying employees more takes up more of your budget, they’re more likely to stay longer — which saves you time and money on hiring and training.
3. Communicate Clearly and Often
If employees don’t know what’s expected of them, they get frustrated and often disengage. This is why it’s important to communicate expectations clearly and make yourself available for questions — especially for new employees.
An easy way to make expectations clear for everyone is to create standard operating procedures (SOPs) for specific tasks. For example, donation intake is a common task at thrift stores. Most stores have a donation box or area where people bring used items to donate. An assigned employee typically takes the donated goods to a back room to be sorted.
Writing a standard operating procedure for donation intake lets each employee know when to take the donation bin to the back room, how to sort donations, and where different kinds of items go on the sales floor so there’s no confusion.
You can also create SOPs for checking out customers, organizing shelves, and even general cleaning. These procedures ensure that the job is done correctly and consistently.
4. Measure Performance
Employees get motivated when they have something to work toward — and are recognized for achieving it. These include goals for individual work and for the entire team.
At a thrift store, these goals include:
- Speed of customer checkout
- Speed and accuracy of sorting donated items
- Loyalty program sign-ups
- Sale of expensive or large items
- Store-wide sales revenue in a month
- Donations received in a month
Make sure to set realistic expectations given allotted time, staff, and funds. If goals are unattainable, employee morale is negatively affected. But if reasonable goals aren’t hit, hold employees accountable and discuss why it was missed.
When your employees hit a significant individual or team goal, celebrate them. When appropriate, offer rewards in the form of store credit, bonuses, raises, or paid vacation days. Recognizing and rewarding employees for extraordinary effort makes them more likely to give this level of effort again.
Related Read: 23 Volunteer Appreciation Ideas for Thrift Stores
5. Use Digital Tools To Increase Efficiency
Employees often experience burnout with repetitive, monotonous tasks, like extensive data entry and manually changing price tags. Modern digital tools help employees save time here.
A point of sale (POS) system makes running your small business easier. While some POS systems have only general retail features, others are designed with specific industries in mind. A thrift-specific POS system offers features to manage donated inventory and color-based discounts.
Investing in the right software decreases the need for administrative work, which frees up your time to help customers (plus, it reduces employee burnout).
Related Read: 7 Thrift Store Tips for Faster Checkout
6. Provide Ongoing Training To Increase Confidence
Limiting employees to one or two responsibilities can make them feel stuck — especially if too much time passes without an opportunity to learn something new or perform a different task. Eventually, they might leave their job to find different work. You can prevent this by allowing team members to learn new skills.
Maybe some employees are only responsible for stocking shelves, organizing, and cleaning. Once they master these areas, train them to ring up customers, or to drive to pick-ups or deliveries. When an employee feels they’re learning new skills and progressing, they’re more likely to stick around.
Having cross-trained employees comes in handy as a business owner, because you can move them around depending on need. And when you have more experienced employees, you can typically schedule fewer at once to run the store.
7. Ask Employees for Feedback
Don’t make the mistake of assuming your employees are doing fine as long as they don’t voice concerns. In addition to monitoring their performance and general demeanor, meet with each of your employees and ask them how they’re doing in their respective roles.
They might share things they enjoy about their job, obstacles they're facing, or confusion they have over unclear tasks or policies. This feedback may reveal issues that affect other members of the team, too.
As employees share feedback with you, listen and consider how to improve your strategy accordingly.
Reducing Employee Turnover With ThriftCart
Retaining your thrift store’s employees saves you time and money and helps the business run more smoothly. While an employee’s decision to leave is ultimately up to them, there are strategies you can use to motivate them to stay longer.
Hiring employees who align with your thrift store’s vision, compensating them fairly, communicating clearly, and measuring performance against realistic goals are all helpful strategies. Don’t forget to implement digital tools to assist with mundane tasks, provide opportunities to grow, and ask employees for their feedback.
A POS system designed for your industry helps you create a better experience for both customers and employees.
ThriftCart is an all-in-one POS solution built for thrift stores. Our software includes general retail features like payment processing, marketing, and website tools, as well as thrift-specific tools like color-based discounting and donation pickup management.
To see what ThriftCart can do for your store, schedule a demo today!
