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Battling brain drain: How knowledge management boosts retail productivity
Recent years have seen retailers battle with persistent skills shortages. Now, the looming retirement boom presents a new productivity threat: Brain drain. Read on for exclusive snippets from our latest research report, packed with insights into the state of the retail skills gap and expert advice for closing the generational skills gap.
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The retail retirement crisis is coming
A looming retirement boom presents a serious problem for frontline industries in the U.K., U.S. and beyond.
Workers over 50 make up around a third of the U.K. workforce, with almost three quarters of 50-64 year olds (72%) in employment as of early 2025. The U.S. has seen similarly high labour participation for older workers. In 2019, almost a third of Baby Boomers in the U.S. were in work or looking for work.
Employment rates for older workers have been slowly rising in recent years. However, businesses in the U.K. and U.S. are bracing for a seismic workforce shift caused by our ageing populations.
Recent Flip research confirms it: Baby Boomers and older Gen X workers are preparing to retire en masse. In fact, 59% of retail and manufacturing workers over 55 plan to retire in the next five years. 89% intend to retire within the decade.
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Key retail threat: Widespread brain drain
Retailers in the U.K. and U.S. face many challenges from rising costs and supply chain issues to changing consumer habits or new agile competitors.
The retirement boom presents yet another hurdle for retail operations. With an ageing population, businesses face the threat of falling productivity due to widespread brain drain.
We spoke to 750 frontline managers for our research into the generational skills gap. Of those managers, 82% say that most technical expertise belongs to workers over 55 years old.
That’s perhaps unsurprising. But in the context of a retirement boom, it’s worrying.
Most managers (72%) are not very confident that the business will retain organisational knowledge as the older generation leaves.
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Skills shortages meet brain drain
Without ways to effectively transfer knowledge from older workers to the new generation, businesses will lose valuable expertise.
That lost knowledge will exacerbate an ongoing issue for retailers: Skills shortages.
Amid a cost-of-living crisis and high attrition rates post-pandemic, retailers are struggling to attract and retain the right talent.
As of 2022, 74% of U.S. retail executives expected coming shortages in customer-facing roles. In a post-Brexit U.K., retail businesses are losing over £20bn annually to a ‘severe skills crisis’.
Saying goodbye to experienced workers will exacerbate these shortages further. 89% of frontline managers say Gen Z employees don’t have all the technical skills they need. Over three quarters (76%) are not confident they can reduce current skills gaps.
Productivity in peril
This skills gap isn't just a future threat, however. Frontline managers already feel the pain of brain drain. The majority (81%) say their team’s overall productivity drops when experienced employees leave.
Inexperience threatens health and safety, customer satisfaction, and overall efficiencies, causing a knock-on effect. Nearly two thirds of managers report that they miss targets at least quarterly due to a lack of skills on their team.
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But inexperienced workers aren't just worse in comparison to their colleagues. They further harm performance by undermining the productivity of the experienced employees who remain.
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According to our research, workers spend an average of 14 hours a week helping under-trained co-workers. That’s more than 18 weeks of lost productivity per full-time worker per year.
The price tag for retail businesses? £11,204 and $11,386 per U.K. and U.S. employee, respectively.
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Boosting retail productivity with better knowledge management
To avoid the threat that brain drain poses to their business operations, retailers need to accomplish three key tasks:
Conserve existing knowledge
Make knowledge and resources accessible to all employees
Onboard new hires more effectively
Yet it’s clear that for most retailers, that’s much easier said than done:
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The key challenge? Teams simply don’t have what they need to close the retail skills gap:
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Conclusion: The retail skills gap needs scalable solutions
To defend against the retirement boom, retail businesses need to effectively onboard and upskill workers.
Yet with retail managers already struggling to meet demands, ad hoc, offline approaches won't suffice.
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Instead, retailers need to systematically capture and distribute information and resources – an impossible task without technology and automation.
Digital solutions enable knowledge transfer at both speed and at scale. This allows businesses to bypass the productivity cost usually associated with onboarding and upskilling an inexperienced workforce.
Better still, retail workers and managers alike are keen for these tech upgrades.
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Expert knowledge management advice: Get the report
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How to bridge the frontline generational skills gap
Produced in partnership with Workplace Intelligence and based on survey data from 1,500 retail and manufacturing workers across the U.S., U.K., and Germany, our latest research report combines retail workers’ perspectives with expert advice on onboarding, training, and upskilling, to help you...
Avoid brain drain by centralising organisational knowledge
Increase new hires' speed to productivity by delivering the right resources at the right time
Foster learning across the employee lifecycle by making knowledge accessible to all employees
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