Chris Brook Carter, CEO of the Retail Trust, talks to Lydia Christie, Head of Retail at Howard Kennedy, about the key issues the retail sector will face in 2025, the impact of the budget and what can be done about the rising levels of abuse that retail staff face.
The Retail Trust is a charity that supports both working and retired retail staff and was founded almost two centuries ago in 1832. Its raison d’etre is to create ‘hope, health and happiness’ for everyone within the industry. Its campaign, ‘respect retail’, has sought to educate the public about the fact that one in three shop workers face weekly abuse, bring together retail businesses focused on addressing this issue and provide more training to help workers protect their wellbeing.
What are the key issues the Retail Trust expects to see at a macro level next year from the retail sector?
At the moment, it’s difficult to see beyond the budget, with the combination of the increases in national living wage, the increases in national insurance, and the fact the government has done nothing to reform rates. The retail industry is the largest employer of young people, largest employer of women and the single largest employer of people outside the public sector. It could sit at the heart of the growth agenda – there’s still so much potential yet to be unlocked. But it continues to be a blind spot for the government.
Shifting focus a little bit. How do you think retail leaders can cultivate a culture of wellbeing and resilience among their workforce?
The truth is that happy, healthy people are a huge net gain for the sector. I would encourage chief executive leaders to see their people as an investment: it’s just common sense that happy colleagues create happy customers. It also reduces churn and absence, which are still significant costs to the industry.
In order to absorb the costs of this budget, the industry is going to need to get better at reducing both. To do that you need a clear strategy in place, and you need data. You need to set some benchmarks and some goals and then really proactively work towards those. I think it’s important that leadership has the right training in order to create the right environments. I think that using data to really monitor what’s working and what’s not in your workforce is super important as well. Secondly, you need to look after your first line, your line managers, and invest in their training.
They are often managing large numbers of people within a business, and can be quite young and more inexperienced, so that training is important. The third thing is we’ve got to come together to do something about abuse by the public against staff in the industry. 40 percent are saying that it’s making them so anxious and so nervous about going to work that they’re considering leaving the sector.
Now interestingly, that drops to about 17 percent in businesses where the respondent says they feel supported and well trained, but it spikes to near 60 percent for those who respond and say that they don’t feel supported and trained. So, while clearly in the long term we need to do something societally to stop this, it’s clear that with the right support, we can help colleagues deal with it better too.
What emerging initiatives to promote employee wellbeing should retail businesses prioritise to stay ahead of the curve and attract top talent?
We’ve got two big initiatives that I feel are a big point of difference to what’s gone before. The first is a new AI generated tool that retailers can use to better understand their colleagues. Here at the Retail Trust, we look after the colleagues of more than 200 retailers in the UK. The second is a campaign we’ve been collecting a lot of data from them. From this, we’ve built an AI generated data platform’, the Retail Trust’s happiness dashboard, that helps us understand in detail what’s going on with staff, benchmarking how they are feeling so it can predict if there’s a risk of poor health and absence.
This then allows leaders to intervene beforehand. running for three years called ‘respect retail’. Since the relaunch of this campaign in October 2024 we’ve been trying to remind customers that staff are human beings and to be kind with advertisements up in shopping centres and even at Piccadilly Circus, thanks to digital screen space donated to the Retail Trust. We’ve also launched a free training program where in November, 1,300 colleagues registered and joined us for online training in how to look after their physical and emotional safety at work.
We want to scale the training so that we can give it to thousands more retail colleagues over the next 12 and 24 months, making sure they’ve got the tools and the capabilities to look after themselves in the face of this rising onslaught of abuse.
With the rise in customer abuse incidents, what strategic measures can be put in place to protect retail staff, and how can these measures be standardised across the industry?
It’s difficult to know what can be standardised: every retailer operates differently, stores look different and customer bases are very different, so the threat is different too. But obviously we’ve seen initiatives like body cameras become more normalised over the last 12 and 24 months, and that does seem to be having an impact to some degree.
I think there’s some work to be done around everyone understanding what the escalation policy is when a colleague has been abused, how they are looked after post-event, to make sure that they’re getting the right support. But the best way that we can protect retail colleagues is to start to see anend to this behaviour.
In what innovative ways can retail businesses leverage technology to enhance employee welfare and create a safer working environment?
Increasingly, we’re able to use the data we’ve got to make sure that people are getting the right help at the right time, because everybody’s needs are different. Everyone engages with wellbeing content and initiatives differently. So our ability to segment and understand what’s going on in certain populations means that we’re able to get the right support into different people’s hands.
For example, the environment in a distribution centre is very different to a head office or store. It’s not a one size fits all thing. People are definitely engaged around different channels and respond to different prompts. The whole idea here is to drive people away from needing our crisis services into engaging with proactive health services so they don’t get into trouble in the first place.
How do partnerships with organisations like the Retail Trust influence industry-wide standards for employee welfare and protection?
Well, I think the interesting thing is that we’re almost 200 years old. If you go back to the very first meeting of this charity in 1832 (covered by The Times, so we can still read about it) it talked about wanting to create a connection between happiness, health and thriving economics. But it also wanted to create what they called a ‘confederacy of good feeling’: the idea being that to create social change, you needed scale, you needed more people to be involved.
So, a big part of our strategy is to get more and more companies involved with us. If we got 300 retailers involved, then that’s over a million people using our services, so the level of data that we’d be sitting on would allow us to start setting some very interesting standards and benchmarks about how to create a happier workforce. The key here is scale, scale of people using our particularly proactive services, and scale of businesses and leaders that are willing to see this as an industry-wide initiative that they need to get behind.
Lastly, how can retail companies effectively measure the long-term impact of their wellbeing initiatives on employee retention and overall business performance?
Well, I think the key is first to work with us! Then the second is to proactively work with us to drive awareness and engagement of our services, because typically, only two to three percent of your population is ever going to need our crisis services. So every percentage point above that is going to be people engaging with the proactive services that are keeping them healthy, and therefore in work. Then you can start to really measure the impact of the things that you’re doing, because you’re getting monthly data points that are showing you your churn risk and your absence risk as a consequence of poor health, and you can also identify what things are driving either your overperformance against an industry standard or your underperformance, and start to make your initiatives very specific.
I think up to this point, the industry’s done a great job since post-Covid around getting things in place to look after people, but it has felt very one size fits all, and it hasn’t really addressed the fact that retail populations are very nuanced. Having data that can be broken down into cohorts that have got clearly actionable insights aligned to them allows you to start building a wellbeing strategy that feels accessible and relevant for everybody.
If you want to find out more about the key trends shaping the retail industry, download the EDGE of retail 2025 report now.
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