How retailers can keep staff from feeling undervalued and stressed

On a Sunday afternoon in Germany, some McDonald’s employees used to make a 45-minute trip for a task that now feels almost absurdly analogue: checking a paper rota. As Abby Guthkelch, VP Executive Advisory at Flip, recalls, there was “a crazy story of, um, people having to drive 45 minutes into the, the sort of the. The restaurant that they were part of. To just look at the notice board with the shift on, um, every single Sunday.” The human cost was obvious: “quite how much productivity and break into people’s home life that was, that was causing.” The operational cost was just as stark. “But it was incredibly inefficient.”

It’s the kind of story that sounds like folklore until you remember how retail work has been managed for decades: information pinned to boards, updates delivered in rushed pre-shift huddles, and “different shift patterns” fragmenting any sense of shared culture. In Guthkelch’s view, this isn’t merely old-fashioned. It’s a frontline experience problem hiding in plain sight — and it’s making retail staff feel undervalued, overstressed, and, in too many cases, ready to leave.

From “content is king” to the frontline reality check

Guthkelch’s career has tracked the rise of digital communication from the awkward early days to its current, always-on dominance. She describes “spent the last 17 years or so, um, working within digital experience,” moving “from in-house roles to consultancy roles and then, um, latterly into sort of like actually within the technology vendor space.” Along the way she’s helped organisations “connect their disconnected workforces,” advising names that span the global and the local: “everything from, uh, Walmart in the, in the US, Currys in the, in the UK through to fashion brands like Stella McCartney, um, as well as an e-commerce sites like, like Farfetch.”

The thread running through it all is a fascination with how meaning travels — and fails to. Early in her career, long before the platforms that now define daily life, she was “working um in a in a FTSE real estate company, um in investor relations and was very much looking at how to get uh messages across through um, video and sort of more audio methods pre pre podcasts.” Even then, she noticed a fundamental challenge: “you could put the same sentence in front of multiple people and everyone would read something different out of it.”

The digital shift has been relentless, but not always coherent. Guthkelch remembers the ability of trends to repeat themselves with a straight face: “there was about 4 or 5 years that the sort of like the leading trend in, in marketing and communications was content is king. And I thought, how can we do this for five years in a row, that this is a trend that’s basically coming through.” Yet the deeper direction is clear — from long-form to short-form, from visual-first to audio-on-the-go, and from corporate broadcasting to community dynamics: “how can you actually build community, um, and ensure that that people feel part of something bigger than just their particular role?”

A major chapter of her journey was Meta, where she worked on the Workplace product. The original name still makes her wince. Abby Guthkelch, VP Executive Advisory at Flip, says, “as it, as it launched, it sort of rather disappointingly was called Facebook for work. And I say disappointingly, because nobody needs Facebook at work.” Rebranded Workplace grew rapidly: “we grew our users from from 1 million to, to 15 million users.” But Guthkelch’s takeaway wasn’t just about scale. It was about what happens when the tools designed for office staff collide with the reality of frontline work.

Flip’s pitch: one touch, one platform — and no excuses

If there’s one premise Guthkelch returns to, it’s that retail staff shouldn’t have to spend their days stitching together multiple systems, logins, and messages — especially when the basic goal is to feel equipped to do the job. Abby Guthkelch, VP Executive Advisory at Flip, describes Flip as “an employee experience, um, app or platform, um, which effectively is designed for enterprises with hard to reach, um, workforces,” particularly “frontline workers like, um, retail store associates, um, manufacturing factory workers, um, logistics of delivery drivers, etc..”

The mission is not simply to message employees more efficiently. It is, she says, “to make people feel more connected to their, their work by connecting them not only with, with people and communications and information, but actually the the systems and the processes to help them get the most out of their work and empower them at work.” The product vision, as Guthkelch puts it: “we connect every employee with everything they need in one touch, in one platform.”

That framing matters because it steps into a debate many leaders are still having with themselves: is the frontline experience “just” a comms problem, or is it the sum of dozens of small frictions that quietly grind people down? Guthkelch’s argument is that it’s both — and that treating it as either/or is how organisations end up with shiny new channels that don’t change daily life.

Most retailers, she says, operate with “upwards of 20 or 30 different systems.” Flip’s approach is to integrate them so frontline staff don’t have to care what sits behind the curtain: “we’re not necessarily housing everything on flip, but we’re creating access points into each of those.” For the worker, the point is simplicity: “they they’re just getting it through flip. They don’t see the fact that you might be using workday or SAP. And really it doesn’t matter to them who you’re using. They just want to be able to get in and do whatever they need to do.”

The promise is compelling — but it also raises questions that a sceptical retail leader might want tested: can one platform truly serve every function without becoming bloated? Do staff see it as empowerment, or as “another app” that management expects them to check? And what about workers who don’t want to use personal devices for work? Guthkelch’s emphasis, though, stays anchored in pragmatism: access on “any employees phone” or “through, um, a desktop browser,” with functionality that spans “live broadcast,” “check calling,” “shift swapping,” “onboarding,” “recognition,” and “learning and development.”

The uncomfortable stats behind “retail is struggling”

Behind Flip’s positioning sits a set of findings Guthkelch believes retailers can’t ignore. Abby Guthkelch, VP Executive Advisory at Flip, says, “we recently conducted some research into frontline workers,” covering “motivation, career growth, um, well-being, satisfaction, job satisfaction, etc..” In the retail segment, one number stands out: “23% of retail workers feel less valued than office based colleagues.”

And the patterns behind “feeling valued” are striking. Guthkelch says, “recognition has the biggest impact on job satisfaction.” When workers are “recognised and appreciated,” she adds, “they’re over three times more likely to go the extra mile and nine times more likely to be satisfied with their, with their jobs.”

Stress, meanwhile, is not an occasional spike — it’s a steady background hum. Guthkelch reports that “retail employees have the highest frequency of stress for frontline workers,” with “20% of them effectively saying they feel burned out every day, um, or multiple times per week.” In her telling, retail is “the unhappiest, uh, frontline worker industry, uh, with only 44% reporting good to excellent, um, well-being.”

Most revealing is the link she draws between wellbeing and the basic mechanics of internal communication. “What’s an interesting correlation that we’ve, we’ve, we’ve found,” Guthkelch says, is that “well-being and, uh, company communication actually goes hand in hand.” And it’s not marginal: where workers feel communication is effective, “they’re almost 13 times more likely to report good or excellent well-being,” and “10 or 9 times less likely to report daily stress or burnout.”

It’s an argument that cuts against the idea that wellbeing is primarily about perks, posters, or apps that offer mindfulness in isolation. Guthkelch does mention “things like access to headspace,” but her focus remains on the fundamentals: clarity, transparency, recognition, and the ability to actually get things done without chasing managers or deciphering conflicting instructions.

Why retail still runs on noticeboards — and how leaders can turn it around

If the stakes are so high, why do so many retailers still feel stuck? Guthkelch’s answer is not that leaders don’t care; it’s that the system is historically hard to reach. “There’s always been a challenge in, in the retail sector of getting communication to, to employees,” she says, due to “permanent versus temporary seasonal staff” and “different shift patterns.” Yet she also sees a stubborn mismatch between what staff want and what organisations provide.

Frontline employees, she says, “prefer digital communications and that’s across all of the, the different age brackets.” Nevertheless, “too many retailers are still relying on analog methods of communication, be that through the staff notice boards or pre shift meetings.” The result is that staff aren’t given “access into um, a sort of a one, um, uh, one app or one platform whereby everyone… can come in and actually consume the information and or access, um, uh, training or onboarding at the pace that they need to go out.”

The fix, in Guthkelch’s view, starts with very human behaviours — then uses digital to scale them. Guthkelch says it’s not enough to say “well done.” It’s “actually showing appreciation… and actually sort of like publicly recognizing them.” She mentions “celebrating anniversaries” and “different achievements in, in life outside of work,” because it helps people feel “seen, to be heard, to be recognized.”

Then there’s two-way communication — the part that can’t be faked. Guthkelch acknowledges the limits of tech evangelism: “digital is wonderful… but nothing’s better than face to face.” The question is whether managers are meeting people “individually outside of just, um, you know, sort of like group shift meetings,” and “actually asking people for, for, for their insights.” She also stresses “encouraging peer to peer learning” — the idea that stores can “sharing insights on what’s going well or what’s not working for them.”

The pandemic briefly made the importance of frontline work impossible to gloss over. Abby Guthkelch, VP Executive Advisory at Flip, says, “the pandemic and particularly for the frontline industries really shone a light on the importance of them.” Without frontline staff, “most businesses wouldn’t actually, um, be able to, to succeed.” Then she offers a line that doubles as a leadership test: “happy people equals happy customer equals happy business.”

But she also warns against the kind of surface-level response that can follow a crisis: “people leant into it… but… has that started to come off?” In some organisations, she says, “the investments have kind of just gone very, um, uh, surface level,” amounting to “Oh, we’ve just given you an access to insert whatever system,” without “truly looked at where, um, all of the different pain points and the opportunities are.”

Her advice for leaders is blunt. Guthkelch says, “you you can’t make change from an ivory tower called an HQ.” Instead, “you actually need to get in and you need to to talk to the people who are doing this job,” including “the managers as well.” Otherwise, leaders risk assuming that having “access to email and an intranet” means they understand frontline reality.

Quick wins, deep fixes — and where AI fits next

So what can retailers do today? Guthkelch returns to a practical starting point: “regular feedback” and “creating that two way communication.” When staff are asked — and “start to see actions coming from it” — engagement can shift quickly. She describes the need for “a space of actually being able to encourage people to share ideas, share experiences, share concerns.”

Operational basics matter too: “effective, sort of like shift management,” and giving staff the ability “to self-serve for some of these things.” That, she argues, reduces “manager stress” and signals respect: “showcasing people that you’re treating them like adults.”

In high-pressure periods, she sees preparation as the difference between coping and burning out: “not just onboarding into how to do something but continuous learning.” She even argues for rehearsal: “role playing,” so in “busy periods” staff know “how are you then going to deal with that.”

Onboarding, in her view, is one of retail’s most urgent leverage points. Guthkelch cites “crazy stats” that “about 25% of frontline workers, um, don’t turn up on their first day,” while those who do can face “upwards of 54 different activities.” Done manually, “it can go horribly wrong,” leading to exits “after sort of like six months.”

This is where she sees AI becoming genuinely useful — not as hype, but as a way to remove friction and uncertainty. Guthkelch points to “AI powered, automated process” that can “welcome new starters… introduce new colleagues… share company values and goals, but do it in a gamified way.” And the payoff is dramatic: with effective onboarding, “they’re 18 times more likely to feel committed to the organization,” and “69% of them are likely to stay for, for upwards of three years.”

Looking ahead, she anticipates capability shifts in “intelligent task allocation,” “predictive workforce management,” and “an AI powered chat bot, um, or virtual assistant,” so staff can “put in a question and get a response back” rather than relying on “a centralized mailbox that’s probably not manned on a Saturday.”

That vision will inevitably attract scrutiny: some employees will worry about surveillance, automation creep, or AI answers that aren’t always right. Guthkelch is careful to position AI as support, not replacement: “I’m not trying to replace store managers. Absolutely not what I’m saying with AI, but it’s how do you make their life, um, easier.”

In the end, her future-facing message circles back to something stubbornly old-school: “putting people first.” Retail success, Guthkelch argues, depends on treating employees as “the face of your, your brand,” creating an environment where they can “thrive. Professionally and personally,” with “career growth,” “internal mobility,” and “that peer to peer learning.”

The technology may evolve — from apps to chatbots to mixed reality — but Guthkelch’s challenge to leaders remains the same: stop managing the frontline from memory, and start designing for the job as it’s actually lived.