Build a High-Trust Retail Workforce that Drives Customer Excellence
As retail expands across formats, geographies and digital channels, employee experience is becoming a critical driver of customer experience, retention, productivity and brand consistency.
Great Place To Work® helps retail organizations strengthen frontline engagement, build store manager capability, reduce attrition and create workplaces where employees and business performance thrive together.
21,000+
organizations assessed globally
20 Million
million employees surveyed
30+
years of research
What Matters in Retail Workplaces Today?
Building a Stable Frontline Workforce
With retail continuing to witness one of the highest attrition levels across industries, organizations are increasingly focusing on improving workforce stability, retention, and long-term employee engagement.
Strengthening Store Manager Capability
Store managers play a critical role in shaping the everyday employee experience. Building leadership capability at the store level is becoming essential for driving trust, engagement, and performance consistency.
Delivering Consistent Customer Experience
As retail expands across stores, cities, and channels, maintaining consistent customer experience and service quality across the workforce has become a growing priority.
Engaging a Younger Workforce
The growing influx of Gen Z and early-career employees is reshaping expectations around growth, recognition, flexibility, wellbeing, and leadership connection in the workplace.
Creating Inclusive Workforce Experiences
Retail organizations are increasingly working toward creating more inclusive and equitable experiences across permanent, temporary, and contractual workforce groups.
Upskilling Frontline Teams at Scale
Rapid industry growth, omnichannel retail, and evolving customer expectations are accelerating the need for continuous capability building across frontline and store operations teams
Great Place To Work® helps retail organizations decode these workforce realities through employee voice, workplace
experience insights, and people practices that directly influence trust, retention, and customer experience.
Inside India's Retail Workforce Reality
Retail Is Facing a Workforce Stability Challenge
42% of retail employees express intent to leave their organization, while annual attrition continues to remain among the highest across industries at 30-35%, making retention a growing business continuity concern for retail leaders.
Frontline Burnout Is Becoming a Service Risk
Emotional wellness scores drop sharply from 86% at the CXO level to 42% among individual contributors, highlighting the emotional pressure carried by frontline teams and its potential impact on customer experience.
Leadership Capability Must Go Beyond Competence
While strategic cohesion in retail organizations stands at 90%, authentic leadership connection is lower at 85%, reinforcing the growing need for leaders who are not only capable, but also visible, approachable, and people-centric.
Customer Experience Is Emerging as a Culture Outcome
96% of employees in high-trust retail workplaces believe their organization delivers excellent customer service, compared to 85% in low-trust workplaces, strengthening the link between employee experience and customer experience.
Dignity at Work Is Becoming a Strategic Lever
2 out of 5 retail employees do not consistently experience dignity at work, despite dignity showing a strong influence on trust, discretionary effort, and intent to stay.
Retail's Workforce Is Becoming Younger Faster
Gen Z representation in retail workplaces has increased from 36% to 42%, reshaping expectations around growth, flexibility, recognition, wellbeing, and leadership connection.
Workforce Diversity Is Improving, but Experience Gaps Persist
Women's representation in retail workplaces has increased from 25% to 28%, yet women continue to score 4 points lower on manager connection and appreciation, highlighting the importance of inclusive workplace experiences.
Mid-Tenure Employees May Be the Hidden Retention Risk
Mid-tenured employees show an 8-point gap on perceptions around fair promotions and evaluation, signaling a potential risk in building future leadership pipelines within retail organizations.
Retail Expansion Is Increasing Pressure on Culture Consistency
As retail organizations expand rapidly across Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, maintaining consistent leadership behaviour, employee experience, and workplace culture across locations is becoming increasingly critical.
Trust in Retail Is Improving, but Experience Is Not Accelerating
While the Trust Index© Grand Mean in retail has improved from 85% to 86%, the overall Great Place To Work® experience score has remained flat at 88%, indicating that trust is improving, but everyday employee experience may not yet be evolving at the same pace.
Helping Retail Organizations Build High-Trust Workplaces
Great Place To Work® combines employee feedback, workplace culture insights, leadership development and advisory expertise to help retail organizations strengthen retention, improve frontline experience, build stronger leaders and scale culture consistently across the business
Diagnose
Understand the workplace experiences shaping trust, retention, frontline wellbeing, leadership connection and customer experience across your retail workforce through deep diagnostics and employee feedback insights.
- Trust Index© Survey™
- Culture Audit™
- Continuous Pulse Surveys
- Custom Survey Questions
- People Practice Evaluation
- Focus Group Discussions
- Readiness Assessment
- Appreciative Inquiry Meetings
- Frontline Workforce Assessment
Analyze
Go beyond data collection with expert-led analysis designed to uncover hidden workforce patterns, leadership gaps, experience inconsistencies and actionable culture insights across stores, teams and workforce groups.
- Employee Comment Analysis
- Expert-Led Insights & Recommendations
- Manager-Level Experience Insights
- Demographic Deep Dives & Workforce Analysis
- Industry Benchmarking Insights
- Interactive Insights Dashboard
- Detailed Reports & Analytics
Develop
Build stronger workplace cultures by equipping leaders, managers and teams with the frameworks, practices and action plans needed to strengthen trust, inclusion, retention and employee experience.
- Action Planning Workshops
- Great Place To Work® Culture Fundamentals
- People Practice Enablement Workshops
- Employee Value Proposition Development
- Inclusion & Belonging Masterclass
- Trust Playbook™
Transform
Drive long-term culture transformation by building leaders who strengthen trust, create meaningful employee experiences and scale culture consistently across the organization.
- Giftwork® People Manager Capability Program
- Leadership Intervention Program
- Architect Program
Earn Recognition
Strengthen employer brand credibility and position your organization among India's leading workplaces through employee-backed recognition and workplace culture assessment.
- Great Place To Work® Certification™
- India's Best Companies To Work For
- India's Great Mid-Size Workplaces
- India's Best Workplaces in Retail
- India's Best Workplaces for Women
- India's Best Workplaces for Young Talent
- India's Best Companies that Care
Featured Insights
Trusted by India's Leading Organizations
Our People
Adishva Doshi
Director - Retail & Strategic Partnerships
Adishva Doshi leads the Retail vertical at Great Place To Work® India, partnering with retail organizations to strengthen workplace culture, frontline experience, leadership capability and employee trust at scale. He works closely with retail leadership teams to understand evolving workforce realities across frontline operations, store leadership, retention, employee experience, and organizational growth. His work focuses on helping organizations translate workplace culture into stronger business performance, customer experience, and employer brand outcomes. Adishva advises organizations across the culture transformation journey, from identifying workforce and people challenges through diagnostics and employee feedback, to designing targeted interventions, leadership programs and workplace solutions contextualized to the unique realities of the retail industry.
Prathamesh Pednekar
Strategic Account Manager - Retail
Prathamesh Pednekar works closely with retail organizations to support their workplace culture, employee experience, and engagement journey across the workforce lifecycle. He partners with HR and business leaders to understand evolving workforce priorities around frontline engagement, manager effectiveness, retention, workplace trust, and organizational growth. His work focuses on helping organizations navigate the assessment journey, interpret workforce insights, benchmark employee experience, and drive meaningful engagement across workplace culture initiatives. Prathamesh also supports organizations in identifying relevant solutions and interventions aligned to their business context, people priorities, and evolving workforce realities within the retail industry.
Learn More About Partnering With Us
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Frequently Asked Questions
Great Place To Work Certification criteria are the global standard for quantifying and benchmarking the employee experience. Using the Great Place To Work Trust Model and the Trust Index Survey, Certification evaluates workplace culture from the perspective that matters the most — the employee — offering the most comprehensive picture on the market of the internal health of an organization.
To be considered for Certification, organizations must have 10 or more employees and must complete a two-step process:
- Survey employees with the Trust Index Survey.
- Complete the Culture Brief, a company questionnaire.
Positive employee responses to the Trust Index Survey (four and above on the five-point scale) are averaged to provide an organization-wide assessment of culture: the Trust Index. Companies that score above the current threshold become Great Place To Work Certified.Surveys must meet strict requirements for how they are distributed and the percentage of employees who respond to ensure they accurately represent feedback from the company’s full population.
In broad terms, the Great Place To Work Trust Index Survey measures the level of trust in your organization and the consistency of the employee experience. In other words: How often can employees count on something happening in their workplace, such as clear and honest leadership, fair treatment, and employee recognition?
More specifically, the Great Place To Work Trust Index Survey measures individual employee experiences of five dimensions of a high-trust company culture through 60 statements and two open-ended questions. Three of the dimensions are connected to the actions of leaders and building trust: credibility, respect, and fairness. The other two dimensions measure the workplace experience of employees in relation to their colleagues and the wider organization: pride and a sense of belonging.
These five dimensions create a workplace culture where employees feel empowered and encouraged to do their most meaningful work. High-trust cultures are shown in Great Place To Work research to outperform their competitors in recruitment and retention, productivity and innovation, and financial performance.
Survey answers are assessed on a five-point scale, revealing the most common experience of employees in the organization. Employee scores are averaged to provide an organization-wide assessment of workplace culture: the Trust Index score.
Yes. Many organizations initially feel they need more time before undertaking the full Great Place To Work assessment. Our approach is designed not just to measure workplace culture, but also to help organizations build readiness over time.
Organizations can begin with focused pulse surveys to understand employee sentiment, identify experience gaps, and work on targeted action areas before moving into the main survey. We also offer a scientific short-format version of the Great Place To Work Employee Survey, giving leadership teams an early directional view of workplace experience and current standing.
In addition to assessments, our team supports organizations through interventions such as Appreciative Inquiry Meetings, Focus Group Discussions, and Orientation Sessions to better understand business context, workforce realities, and leadership priorities.
For many organizations, readiness is not a fixed milestone. The journey often begins by taking the first step to understand where the organization stands today and identifying the opportunities to strengthen employee experience over time.
Store managers directly shape the everyday employee experience. Great Place To Work supports organizations through capability-building interventions such as Giftwork, leadership development programs, action planning workshops, and manager effectiveness insights designed specifically to strengthen trust, communication, recognition and team experience.
Organizations partner with Great Place To Work to understand how effectively their leaders create the conditions for an overwhelmingly positive employee experience. Great Place To Work offers best-in-class data about the employee experience, sourced from surveys taken by millions of employees globally. This data offers organizations invaluable insight into how their workers will interact with the workplace and establishes benchmarks for working conditions around the world.
Great Place To Work’s employee-centric view of the workplace was revolutionary 30 years ago. Today, our Trust Model offers an unmatched opportunity to identify what’s happening within your organization. Great Place To Work’s survey and analysis gives employers the ability to measure and track employee experience against key metrics and industry leaders.Earning Great Place To Work Certification has many benefits, including:
- Better recruitment metrics such as offer acceptance rate
- Higher business profitability
- Automatic Best Workplaces award eligibility
- Greater employer brand awareness
- Improved employee trust
- Higher retention
- Greater employee pride in the company
- Recognition for having great people managers and leaders