CATO Creative

Bekki Cait is the Founder of CATO Creative, a retail employee experience consultancy that helps corporate teams earn real buy-in with store teams through diagnostic listening, narrative framing, and operational integration. She is also the co-host of Dear Corporate… Love Stores, a podcast dedicated to the conversations retail's corporate and store teams rarely get to have with each other.

Building a Retail-Focused Consultancy

I'm not who you'd expect to be working in retail employee experience. I'm not a career retailer. I'm a creative.

Years ago, a national retailer asked me to articulate their employer brand and re-focus their employee experience around it.

Once we started talking about bringing it all to life in stores, I realized we needed way more context—context that our corporate clients didn't have either.

So I spent hundreds of hours personally interviewing and listening to field leaders, and the insights were as revealing as they were numerous.

Misalignment between corporate and store teams was a central theme, but the more surprising realization was that structurally and socially, conversations between them were difficult to have. So they remained mysteries to each other.

What evolved from all of this is an approach we call Operational Engagement. We still articulate meaningful employer brands, but more importantly, we help ensure those promises are experienced in stores as the daily work itself, not posters or apps.

And that means getting creative.

What Retailers Face While Delivering Strong Employee and Customer Experiences

I see two directly connected challenges:

First, change fatigue.

Store managers frequently tell me, "Corporate keeps rolling out new tools and systems to 'boost engagement.' But my team is so burnt out. We need another tool, app, or channel like we need another hole in the head."

The common cycle is: engagement drops, so you buy a new tech solution, train everyone, get limited adoption, watch engagement drop further, repeat.

And with each initiative that doesn't land, trust erodes and change fatigue deepens. Eventually, teams tune out or actively resist new programs, making future transformation much harder.

Second, AI, but maybe not how you think.

The conversation about AI in retail tends to focus on efficiency and automation. But few people are talking about its potential to eliminate the moments that build teams.

When a new employee doesn't know where to find their pay stub and asks a coworker, they get an answer and the beginning of a relationship. When a manager gets a clever question from someone on their team, that's a chance for recognition and noticed potential. The senior employee who walks someone through the POS quirks isn't just transferring knowledge; they're becoming someone worth staying for.

Trust and connection get built in the micro-moments AI eliminates. You don't get to automate the questions, the learning, the messiness and keep the bonds. They come together.

Align Workforce Engagement With Operational and Business Goals

We treat workforce engagement as an operational discipline, not a communications one.

Most organizations default to communications as the primary engagement lever, using the posters, the apps and the intranet. But communications don't create engagement. These three channels do:
• The first and most powerful is the store manager. Research consistently shows managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in their team's engagement. A psychologically safe, recognition-oriented manager can make almost any environment feel worth showing up for. A performative one will undermine even the most generous benefits package.

• The second channel is operations. Do scheduling practices respect life outside work? Does the callout policy signal empathy or suspicion? Do store visits feel supportive or punitive? This is where promises are kept or broken, one shift at a time.

• The third channel is communications. Information hubs sustain and amplify an experience that's already real. They don't create it.

Most retail engagement strategies begin at channel three. The real work starts at channel one.

The Future of Retail Consultancy

Sustainability is the one I'm watching most closely. It’s become a symbol of trustworthiness, a lens through which store teams evaluate whether or not they trust their employer.

Expectations have changed. People aren't asking whether a company has a sustainability program anymore. They're asking where the cotton was grown, who the vendors are and how the animals were treated. Employees, communities and activists are looking into the parts of the business that used to be invisible. And they're demanding real answers, publicly.

The hiding places are gone.

Store teams are the frontline. When the company's sustainability story doesn't match what they’re asked to do everyday, they notice and trust erodes.

Retailers need to get ahead of this and ask themselves what they really stand for and whether they can back it up with investment and action.

Compliance isn't enough anymore. Activist organizations know their power is in numbers, and they're using it for good, for the planet. It's actually a beautiful thing.

Enhancing Employee Experience for Long-Term Retail Success

Check the foundation before you build.

Store teams don't experience your organization through your programs. They experience it through a thousand small daily signals—their schedule, their manager, their workload, which policies get enforced and which don't.

When those signals contradict what a program or comms campaign is trying to say, the program loses. Every time.

Tell me we're like a family, then have a bag check policy. Tell me we care about sustainability, then ship single-use plastic marketing materials to every store. Tell me I have a career here, then make every leadership hire externally. These contradictions are very visible to store teams.

There has to be proof of your values and promises in the day-to-day.

Before you add something new, ask what signals stores are already receiving and whether they support or contradict what you're trying to build.

The gap between what you're investing in and what's actually landing in stores is closeable. But it requires going deeper than communications, programs and perks.

Real engagement is won and lost in the day-to-day. That’s where the opportunity is.