Trust issues: why wellbeing support must be a priority this winter
By Chris Brook-Carter, chief executive of the Retail Trust
With preparations for Christmas, retail’s busiest time, now well underway, our new Retail People Index has underlined why it’s critical for employee wellbeing to remain central to retailers’ festive plans.
Launched in partnership with global consulting firm AlixPartners to track wellbeing trends over the last year, over 2,000 retail staff were asked about their mental and physical health and how valued and fulfilled they are at work to create overall wellbeing scores.
Questions around pay, recognition, relationships with managers, work-related anxiety and workplace safety were among those used to calculate the likelihood of them leaving their jobs or working while unwell in the last 12 months.
The index reveals there was a 7% drop in overall wellbeing between the start of autumn 2023 and the end of last winter, with half of retail workers found to be at risk of quitting or, perhaps even worse, working while unwell in the weeks following Christmas.
And it shows an even a greater mental health toll on younger people, with retail workers aged between 19 and 34 found to be 10% more likely to leave their retail jobs than the workforce as a whole at the start of the year. Meanwhile, half of 19–24-year-olds were at risk of coming into work while sick between April and June this year, despite the risk among the workforce as a whole dropping down to a third by this time.
We’re extremely grateful to AlixPartners and our strategic data partner WorkL for their support, and delighted the Retail People Index will now be published quarterly. We firmly believe it will help the industry respond to the needs of our colleagues to create happier, healthier and more productive businesses.
It has already shown why retailers need to initiate the right wellbeing support ahead of this Christmas when the mental health pressures on retail staff are likely to peak again. And this support is particularly important for younger employees who say they feel less happy and safe at work and lack the right tools to manage their stress and anxiety.
Employees like 22-year-old Phillip who told us after beginning a new marketing placement with the Perfume Shop: “If I had been dealing with just one thing, it would have been okay. But putting it all together – getting used to a new job, meeting new people, working out how to exist in an office, my living situation – it was overwhelming. I started to dissociate. I’d go home after work and there would be nothing.”
Thanks to the support put in place by The Perfume Shop, Philip reached out to the Retail Trust for help and we were able to set up a series of counselling sessions that have helped him develop new techniques to prevent future situations becoming unmanageable.
“I still experience moments of dissociation, but now I’m more patient with myself,” he said. “Rather than panicking, I’m much more relaxed and I’m way more comfortable in the situation I’m in.”
Our hope now for the Retail People Index is that it will spur on more businesses from across the sector to address the causes of poor wellbeing, absenteeism, presenteeism and staff turnover within their organisations, because they can see the fundamental link between the hope, health and happiness of a business’s workforce and its economic resilience.
In doing so, they will also help to ensure a more sustainable and successful retail industry as a whole.
You can download the Retail Trust and AlixPartners’ first Retail People Index here.
