Ranking: The 50 best places to work in retail

As we head towards Christmas – undoubtedly the busiest time for retail – staff will be working harder than ever, with thousands more temporary workers joining the sector as businesses increase their people power to help keep up with the expected growth in customers.

So, which is the best business for new employees to join? And who is doing a great job of keeping their staff happy in the workplace? Retail Week teamed up with WorkL to deliver the definitive ranking of the best places to work in retail right now.

More than 3,000 respondents at over 1,500 retailers took WorkL’s Happy at Work Test and answered questions under six key categories: empowerment, pride, satisfaction, reward and recognition, wellbeing and information sharing.

Pets at Home and Fat Face topped the ranking, in first and second place respectively, with both scoring particularly high for empowerment, pride and information sharing.

Pets at Home chief executive Lyssa McGowan told Retail Week she was thrilled about her business topping the table as the best place to work and that the result was all down to its hard-working staff.

“This is testament to our incredible teams and their unwavering dedication to serve a nation of pet lovers,” she says.

“Our frontline colleagues are at the heart of our business, and their hard work and enthusiasm has not only driven the growth of our business but has also made us a pioneer in providing the best experiences for our consumers.

“They are the reason we are successful and this award is a tribute to their tireless efforts. Thank you all for your incredible work.”

WorkL founder Mark Price says the top two placements make sense as Pets at Home is “enthusiastic about the business” and Fat Face has been “really focused on people issues”.

Chief executive of the Retail Trust Chris Brook-Carter agrees it is “not a surprise” to see the two retailers at the top.

“Retail Trust is very much part of how they build their wellbeing and happiness strategies for their people and they’re very engaged,” he says.

“I think they also understand the clear link between the business thriving and having a happy, healthy workforce.”

Top 10

Dropping down a few points and completing the top five are fashion retailer River Island, luxury department store Liberty and health and beauty retailer Superdrug – all achieving an engagement score of more than 76%.

Taking the sixth spot – and ranked as the best supermarket to work at – is Iceland.

It beat all the other grocers and comes eight places above the next highest-ranking supermarket, Waitrose. It was also way ahead of Tesco, the lowest-ranking supermarket, in joint 36th place.

Finishing off the top 10 is The Works, achieving a perfect score in the ‘wellbeing risk’ category. No members of The Works staff surveyed felt as if management didn’t care about their wellbeing – the only retailer on the list to achieve that. 

Chief executive Gavin Peck told Retail Week there are many things the company is doing to support the wellbeing of colleagues.

“We have a number of measures in place such as our MyWellbeing Hub, where colleagues can access resources designed to support their physical, mental and financial wellbeing, and Wagestream, an app that offers a range of financial wellbeing tools,” he says.

“But we believe that the most important factor is a company’s culture and for colleagues to have a real purpose in their role. We want our colleagues to continue having rewarding careers and to look forward to coming to work each day.” 

Happy staff, happy retailer

WorkL conducts Happy at Work Tests across several sectors and Price says companies in other industries tend to receive better scores than those in retail.

“Since Covid, the scores for retail have declined,” he says. “If you’re in retail, you can’t work from home and there have been challenges relating to Covid and the cost of living, as well as recent rises in shoplifting and retail crime.”

This is evident in some of the category scores, with a few retailers receiving high scores for ‘flight risk’, meaning that employees are actively looking to leave within the next nine months. 

The Range received the highest amount of staff revealing they are a flight risk at 83.3%, whereas only 6.9% of Fat Face employees said they would want to leave the business soon.

Boohoo received the highest score in the ‘wellbeing risk’ category, with 87.5% of workers saying they felt management did not care about their mental, physical and financial wellbeing.

There are significant implications to having such high numbers in the flight risk and wellbeing risk categories, according to Brook-Carter, as it leaves retailers with huge costs and unhappy employees.

“We spoke to businesses where having a change of 1% in terms of total churn in your business can cost or save you £150,000 a year,” he says.

“There is a massive financial impact of this high churn, which is linked to how the business is performing, which then goes on to link to the health and happiness of employees.

“There isn’t just a moral obligation to look after your people, but there is a very clear, data-led financial upside to having happy colleagues.”

Price reiterates this point. WorkL uses an ‘extra discretionary effort calculator’ to track employee happiness levels, as well as staff turnover and sickness absences, to compare with other companies, and he often finds that lower levels of staff turnover and sickness really add to the bottom line.

It seems that keeping staff happy not only results in employees feeling empowered, respected, recognised and well looked after, but there is also a commercial benefit for retailers in having satisfied staff.