Next Steps: Grooming Young Employees

How do you decide to invest in young employees? Will they stay? Do they care? Listen to your fellow independent natural organic retailers from around the country relate their recruiting experiences.

Southeast Retailer: “We’re still trying to find people to work. Young staff members used to be happy with our pay level, and I’m paying more than before. One young person has left to go bartending and is making more in one night than with us during longer hours, although she said she did not expect us to match her pay. Some younger workers are making choices that make no sense to me; the price you pay for working certain jobs. The work she had with us was her first job, and she learned so much, and became so effective these last few months, increasing her knowledge base and skill set. That kind of learning opportunity is a huge step forward for a young person in their first position. I don’t know that they know that at this age, but I know it. I wish they knew the opportunity they had here. She does know, and has so much to give in our venue, but is going off in another direction.

“I have the opposite situation, too. A long-time employee, with us 20 years, had started waiting tables and couldn’t stand it anymore. She started with us in a retail floor position. Although she was somewhat of a curmudgeon, and not personally into natural foods, she was smart, and became really good with inventory management and ordering. She is now a key player. I more and more value what she brings. She hated being in the service industry. Now, she has two kids, and we’ve given her the flexibility she needed. Recently, she turned down an offer to work at the local university, because she felt we needed her. I wouldn’t have heard that from her directly, but one of her coworkers shared that with me. She values the environment we create here. As one of the career people I have, she gets paid considerably more.

“It takes time to teach young people the skills to be a good employee. A lot of time. And we’ve been grooming people who then leave. I have a young man in the deli for a year. He thinks he knows more than he does, and I don’t think he has any idea about how we are ‘raising’ him. For example, he won’t just say, May I take your order? and runs his mouth too much, which irks the stew out of some customers. But he may see being groomed as a bother rather than a benefit. He just gave notice that he’s going to wait tables, figuring he’ll make more money through tips. He’ll be working nights instead of days though. But he has to make his own way. I don’t rule the world, although sometimes I wish I did.

“Recently, we asked another employee to come back two days early from vacation. We had stretched to accommodate her request for extended vacation time but needed to fill two newly vacant shifts. While she agreed to do it, she asked for a raise or overtime pay. The idea of a two-way street is lost on her. She robbed herself of the good feeling of being a team player, and potentially ruined her chances of long-term advancement in our store.

“We have had some victories. One employee who makes our schedule told me, ‘I was channeling my inner [store owner] and observed how you handled scheduling conversations; not throwing rocks, giving the employee the information they need to get the outcome we need.’ It was a win to find a place for someone like her who is not good on the sales floor, but good in the back room. If they can see I’m getting good lessons here.

“A teacher at the university has sent students to us, telling them they’ll learn to interact with the public, which will be of great value to them. It is one of the most enjoyable things about the work: young people seeing the tools they can develop that help them in work and in life. Our ‘model.’ One of the most rewarding things is when someone who has worked here before comes back years later and says how much they appreciate the skills they learned while working here.”

Midwest Retailer I: “Business is hard on the employee front. I love the idea of grooming the next generation. We’re struggling with it to some degree, as are most people. Retail-related work is not sexy. It’s hard, long hours. And how do you get that person excited to do that? Especially offering a four-day, or a flexible schedule, when the attitude in the mind of the next generation is I don’t want to come in every day.

“Our sales are up this year 8% over last year. I’m shocked because last year was a great year. I wish I could answer the question why? with certainty. There is a long history of who we are, with my parents having started the business in the ‘60s. For the most part, we still represent who we are. But it has been hard staffing in the last few years. Do new employees, new applicants, understand what we are? No. We have to tell some stories. Our older, long-time employees are wrapped in the mission. The newer younger generation doesn’t care about my mom or why she started the store. They do not have the same mission. There is not the same curiosity to learn why we merchandise that apple in just such a way on the display stand. They’re not driven the same way, with the same standards.

“So how do you tell the story? Bluntly, because recently I’ve had to shift my attention away from the store. How do we make up for that? It is not impossible. I need to be more involved in the onboarding process. We’ve created some videos for that purpose. I do think this generation cares, wants to care. They are trying to figure out What do I care about? And, How hard should I have to work? All they hear is the supposed social media success stories of the $10,000-a-month podcast. Will they really stick around and learn the people and job skills at retail?

“We have a young man we’ve been teaching and training for the last two years. He’s a good, steady, hard-working intelligent young man. Recently, he told our general manager he was leaving–I just want to go do a few things. Our GM told him, ‘If you walk out the door, I will never hire you back. You said you were committed, and I’ve been investing in you. But you’re just going to leave because you don’t know. You can be a stock kid if you like.’ It is in those sorts of conversations where our GM excels. He couldn’t do it successfully unless he already had the trust and respect of the employees first. No one works harder than he does, and the employees know he will bend over backwards to help them through any challenge, at work or personal. The young man decided to stay on.”

Midwest Retailer II: “We were in the middle of hiring for one of our management employees who was retiring from a key position after 10 years. So, we were looking at succession, and took our time to hire a replacement 1.5 years ago. They didn’t work out. Next, we hired a young man who had the willingness to take over the program, which required significant statistical fluency. It renewed my faith in the younger generation. He’s now challenging us every day. The younger folks are sharp as can be because they are exposed to so much. But they don’t always have the interpersonal relationship piece that others do. Our new young hire has better data analysis skills than our former employee. That allowed all the systems she had set up with so much hard work to be passed on, preserved, and improved.

“As an owner, you have to invest in that. If you turn people over and they don’t stay, you still have to invest in key central management positions. In the stores, it is different. Some of our employees have retired out, or had health issues. Finding those that want to work retail is a challenge. They come in and want to start at the manager level, but they don’t understand the business. I don’t think they have a connection back to the generations who started the business. If you can make someone feel part of something, they’ll stick around.

“But what is that? Three months? Six months? Our culture was rocky coming out of COVID, the social isolation. People want to connect and are excited to be part of something. But how do you hire for that? Getting the store managers together with the central team helped more than I realized it would. Don’t give up the foundation. Revisit why we do this. People don’t understand why we share this history, the mission. Nobody cares. You have to figure out where they are, and plug them in. Let the managers share with each other what they are seeing in their different stores. The stores are developing different personalities and may be going in different directions culturally. But they have a voice. We’re still our foundational brand and identity. We need to help new young employees understand why. Don’t assume they don’t want to know. You may have to figure out what that connection is. It is the grit. Don’t give up on people.”

"Finding those that want to work retail is a challenge. They come in and want to start at the manager level, but they don’t understand the business...If you can make someone feel part of something, they’ll stick around."

–Midwest Retailer II

Mid-Atlantic Retailer I: “We invest in those employees who show initiative and an interest in what we are doing. I shy away from those who want more, as an entitlement, to advance quickly just because they are here. We see a little, but not much of that. We hire carefully. With 65 employees, we have a full-time human resources manager. We use a [third-party] online application platform that includes a psychological assessment. That helps flag people who may not be honest, or who are more aggressive. It rates where they fall on a bell curve for adaptability, cooperation, and handling stressful situations. Some are less entitled and more patient than others, but situations do change for some people after they’re hired. One young man, with us for two years, asked for a $3 raise. We looked where he was compared to his peers on the general floor staff. We would have had to adjust many other employees to make what he was asking fair, within the pay bands. Instead, we made a counteroffer he didn’t accept, and he went to Trader Joe’s, starting at $18 per hour, and $28 per hour on Sundays.

“We had a similar situation with a kitchen employee who asked for a significant raise. When we didn’t give her what she asked for, she left. The first employee left for more money, the woman had more of an entitlement mentality, and she quit without giving notice. Another former employee reapplied, and we offered her a job at 50 cents an hour less than she asked for, and she ghosted us. Those are the outliers. We have very little turnover, with many employees here for 10 to 20-plus years. We’ve only turned over two management-level positions, down through shift leaders, in the last four years. Both employees left for career changes to sectors that pay dramatically more than retail. The age of our workforce is starting to average up because our retention is so good. We have a kitchen employee who is 72, and several senior staff in their 50s and 60s. All of our managers are over 30.

“We have had some trouble getting entry level personnel recently. We’ve gone from getting dozens of applications to just a few applicants on Indeed. We had a baker that quit six months ago, and just replaced her. There were no qualified applicants until she applied. We are looking for people who are enthusiastic and who are interested in what we do. Our employees skew towards women, who in our experience tend to be more collaborative than men. Of our shift leaders, department managers, assistant managers, administrators, and owners, only four are male—including me.

“What do we do to retain employees? We create positions for those who show promise. We’ve promoted employees who have proven themselves up from clerk/stocker roles to a variety of newly created positions: assistants to department managers, receiving manager and assistant, an extra shift leader, even IT Administrator. Of course, keeping up with pay rates is important, but not always possible. We are constantly looking at those. We also offer an ICHRA [Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement] health insurance reimbursement plan, life and disability insurance, a 401K match for retirement, and store discounts of 20% for part-time, and 30% for full-time employees. We ask for and do our best to model a culture of kindness, both towards each other as well as to our customers.”

New England Retailer: “Developing young people is harder than ever. Soft skills are more important than ever. People can interview really well, are politically savvy, and can get along in the job for a while. This is the hardest time that I’ve ever had in running my business. Due to my length of time in the industry I find myself waxing nostalgic a lot more. Some of the stories I’m sharing with employees, would they have enough of the background? It’s all news to them. What were those early days like with [distributors], the people, the entities, how did the industry come together? People forget. Now it’s important to not lose that information.

“There is also a strong ageism bias in the young for the old. That’s a paradigm shift. What media, social and cultural influences people are consuming. It’s part of the symptoms of a bigger picture. People don’t want to work: It’s not that simple. I have phenomenal young people. But they are few and far between. The five levels of Maslow [Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs], the human universal needs and drives are there in some form. It’s useful as a reference, a good framework that is still very much there.

“But how people are getting meaning—we don’t have the commonality we once had, what unifies us as a society. We consume such granular information, and no longer share experiences across the country. And this is amplified by digital AI [artificial intelligence] algorithms. The smartphone “Info” box keeps feeding you, so you keep consuming, in your own echo chamber. Even if you are aware of the bias, it is still getting into your head. YouTube is bad.”

Northeast Retailer I: “There are all these deep psychological theories. But it is not that complicated. We need to remind ourselves these are jobs like millions of other U.S. jobs. We’ve seen the work-averse behavior wane a bit since peaking in the second year of COVID. My theory is the essential businesses that stayed open avoided this pitfall, because people stayed on and didn’t go home. The show went on. We powered through. The business continued. We were not remote, so we didn’t have to rebuild our culture.

“There are fewer people in the workforce than three years ago. Some are retired. Some were afraid to go to work. You hope you hire the right people. If you do, you want to see them evolve, so you invest in and promote them. Sometimes you get it wrong, it’s a bad fit, or a bad person, and you move on from them.

“In our business, we are trying to be more decisive and determine sooner if they are working out or not, and not give them a million chances. You want to invest and move them up because they were right to begin with. The team must have realistic expectations about how long people will want to stay. It could be a first job, maybe they are a student, or are between careers and want a change. Or it could be someone who wants to be part of our culture. There’s no one-size-fits-all. We say, ‘Hire hard, live easy.’ Focus on making great hires in the first place.

“But the reality is sometimes you just have to hire someone, make a compromise. You are nervous—sometimes it does work out, even if it wasn’t a hire you would have made six months ago. We want to be more decisive, but employment laws, fears of being understaffed, many things get in the way. But we are trying to mold the culture, hire the right people, and change out the wrong employees sooner than later. There are stories of people leaving for a 50-cent pay increase, or for three bucks. A lot of those come back because they want community and culture. It’s not all about the money.”

Mid-Atlantic Retailer II: “We have found that applicants and new hires in their 20s and 30s are attracted to our company’s mission; however, the prospect of retaining them has proven to be difficult. With those who have worked for us long enough to join the general administration team; those in the purchasing, HR, marketing, or finance departments, there’s almost no turnover. Having job meaning, good pay, and respect for leaders is there, but may not trickle lower down across the stores.

“We’re hoping to offer a career path here, which we know requires competitive pay and benefits. Over the past year we have increased our pay ranges and the number of paid sick and vacation days. We also offer all full-time team members medical insurance and pay a large portion of the premiums. It’s costing us a lot more this year, partly because we include plan options for parents with kids. I think one factor is the ACA [Affordable Care Act] where kids can stay on their parents’ health plan until age 26, which I believe also lowers the incentive for 20-somethings to look for and keep full-time jobs. It’s not like it was when I was getting started. In my 20s, I took a job driving a truck to get my own health insurance. Today, it’s easier to switch in and out of jobs. People can go away, travel, come back, and slot back in.

“For young people, their expectations appear to be different than older generations. They are more focused on quality-of-life issues. COVID seemed to change people’s expectations about the flexibility work would provide. The other piece is that many young people are concerned about what they can look forward to in the future. They are concerned about climate change, and wonder, What will the world look like when I’m 40? It’s similar to when I was their age, in the ‘70s. I thought about nuclear war. It impacted me. But for them, the idea of a career as a long-term proposition isn’t compelling because the perceived threat from climate change is not long-term.

“So, what we’re focusing on now is making our store team leaders aware of the cost of recruiting, and the cost of turning over employees. If a team member sticks around three to four years, we consider that a win. We’re trying to figure out how to introduce more compassion at the front-line levels of the stores, so not to lose people unnecessarily. Of course, busy retail grocery stores require hard work, constant interruption, and in some cases demanding customers, from the back end to the front end, which makes the job difficult at times, but we do not want to lose team members by overreacting to things like occasional tardiness. We try to develop camaraderie. It is vital that our leadership team be inspiring and working out of a culture of ‘servant-leadership.’ We experience long-term retention when team leaders express appreciation and are willing to help with the everyday work of receiving, ordering, and stocking. I would attribute our success over the years to a great degree on happy coworkers.”

West Coast Retailer: “The biggest part is always the training. It’s the hardest to do because we’re often short-staffed. It’s hard on management, because they have to do a lot of overtime, training on weekends. But it is essential. If the employee is not invested in the work, the store, the culture, then you get the attitude, This is harder than I thought, and they are gone.

“It’s critical that you don’t let go of the mentoring too soon, which is tough because you are pulled in so many directions in the store. And it is still hard to get applicants to begin with. Once we get them in the door, they usually like what we have to offer. Having a set schedule is one of the keys for job applicants. For example, we just made a great deli hire. He came from a restaurant where the schedule was unpredictable and jammed. He said, ‘Here I have an actual lunch break!’ And you have to look at the non-monetary things. It’s a given we have to pay a competitive wage, but the job also has to support a work/life balance for them.

“It’s tough to hire young people. They are going more part time, and people in general don’t want to work 40 hours. So, we flex the schedule a lot. Those under 18 are tough, partly because of state laws. For instance, as a minor you can’t run machinery like a deli slicer or garbage recycler, and you can’t sell alcohol.”

Northeast Retailer II: “We’ve had a mixed experience with any age group. You do get all the negative issues, entitlement, leaving for more money. But I feel like here, people’s schedule being consistent has always been important. It’s not switching between night and morning. The younger ones like the money and aren’t as concerned with benefits, so that comes out of the equation. They can stay on their parents’ health insurance until they are 26. Benefits are more important with older people.

“There are some younger people chasing a paycheck, with no job commitment. We have a few young people in their 20s or just out of school, and I am working with them trying to gauge if I’m going to have success. I do tend to succeed. One of my right-hand people is 24. I’ve spent a lot of time with her the last two years, training how to order produce. Now we are training the second layer of people under her, in their earlier 20s, trying to bring them along. It’s always rewarding when you have success. The mentorship is a big piece. You have to invest time. You must prove their work has meaning because many are very casual about what a job is. We teach communication, and when not to communicate. Like when they are on the register, or not carrying on with a coworker.

“I swear people used to come with some understanding of this. We have a lot of young people in their early 20s, a lot who are 35 to 45, and a couple 50-plus. These are the age brackets I have right now. Half our staff are kids just coming out of high school. We have a lot of part time college kids who are cashiers, but that is all they aspire to while they’re here. As college costs are high, people are thinking about next steps after high school and not immediately going to college. They work part time and go to school part time. But you have to be willing to invest. It takes a lot longer to train young employees. They have lots of questions. You must talk them through it all, explain, and give them time to learn. I’ve never shied away from that. If we’re successful, you get long-term employees. But even if it’s only three to five years, I’m hopeful that the return is that they turn around and teach other young employees what they know.

“The young employees I get tend not to have gone to college, and they are looking to sink their teeth into the work. I have a young girl who graduated high school last year, and started community college this year, but stopped in January because she was so stressed about life pressure. She took a semester off. I asked her what she was thinking. She said, ‘I’m not planning on going back yet. I really just want you to teach me everything you know.’ I laughed, ‘That will take a while,’ I said. She said, ‘You were putting up an endcap and didn’t even need to think of where the shelves need to go. I was so amazed by that! It’s not beneath me to be your b__h. I have no concerns. I just want you to show me the ropes. I’ll be your slave.’

“She now is teaching a younger person produce-ordering to fill in on her days off. That’s good. It makes them feel good, too. I think it’s also good for me as a woman. I employ a lot of younger women. For them it is important to see another woman who has achieved success. It empowers them and is exciting for me. I have had success with it. There are days, 30 years into this business, that I ask myself if I have the patience to do this again. But it is one of the rewarding things of the job for me.” WF