The Co-operative Food | Store Managers Induction Programme

The Brief

The Co-operative Food business, the largest business within The Co-operative Group, was looking for a transformational culture shift across its nearly 3000 food stores in the UK. A new breed of Store Manager’s were about to be recruited as ‘pioneers of change’ who were:

• Customer Centric – had a laser beam focus on the customer
• Performance Orientated -  were able to drive profitable sales as a no.1 priority
• People Orientated – saw employee engagement as a key strategic leader
• Operationally Excellent – were switched on to the operation in order to drive sales

 
In September 2008, The Co-operative approached NKD to help them “lead The Co-operative Food business into the 21st Century” and in January 2009, NKD Learning began designing a  leading edge Store Managers Induction programme that delivered short and long term business results improve and created leaders who were ambassadors for the ‘New’ Food business.  And all of this from a programme that needed to be reduced from 12 months to 12 weeks!

The Solution

This induction programme was to signal a new era at The Co-operative Food, so it needed a breakthrough solution that would demonstrate a break from the past!

NKD began with a Discovery phase, delivered through a series of focus groups, meetings and Design Labs. The aim of this phase was to meet a cross section of people in key roles in the Food business, to gather relevant insights and information into the world of The Co-operative Group, its brand and Food Retail business. This phase was vital for NKD to get to the heart of The Co-operative Food business in order to design a programme that delivered real business results.

After testing out their insights with current Store Managers and members of the HR team, NKD set about creating a challenging, engaging and very practical 12 week programme, combining latest thinking face-face learning with in-store experiential development.

The programme was modular in its approach, with a series of workshops focusing on a key business areas – all linked to The Co-operative Food balanced scorecard. The first workshop was an intensive 5 days that focused on Retail Transformation, delving deep into the world of The Co-operative Brand, Contemporary Retailing and 21st Century Leadership. During the 4 weeks that followed, the new Store Managers ‘Store Experience’ enabled individuals to put into practice their key learning and insights from week 1 through a series of projects, assignments and on-the-job learning. 

The programme continued with a second 2-day workshop focusing entirely on the Customer.  This provided  the group invaluable time to understand customer loyalty and helped them develop strategies to ensure a great customer experience is delivered consistently in store.

A second 4 week Store Experience followed prior to the final 2-day workshop brought the group back one last time for Driving High Performance. This time, the focus of the workshop was motivating and inspiring their in-store teams to deliver the Co-operative Customer Experience every day, to every customer.

For the learning to be memorable, insightful and practical, the whole programme was designed to create their end of programme 90 Day Performance Contracts – which were signed off with their new Line Managers as key, measurable deliverables for their first three months in their own stores.  All the actions in these contracts were linked back to the balanced score card and were focused on driving increased sales and profitability within this time period

A range of accelerated learning and NLP methods, contemporary film, diagnostics, skill masterclasses, self-managed Learning Sets, peer coaching and the latest behavioural change thinking all contributed to the increased engagement and development of the Store Managers.

Results

Whilst this Store Mangers Induction is relatively new, feedback results have been extremely positive, with each workshop getting average scores of around 5.6 out of 6.

As a direct result of the programme, new Store Managers felt ‘motivated and extremely equipped’ to manage their own store and were confident to ‘raise the bar’ in terms of customer service, sales performance and employee engagement.

The Co-operative Food have reported a ‘buzz and an energy’ with the new Store Managers and a ‘business drive and acumen that will really support our aim of being 21st Century Food retailers with 21st Century Store Managers leading the way’.

As for an increase in sales and customer satisfaction during the first 90 day period, we will report fully on this when we have evaluated the results with The Co-operative.  Anecdotal evidence suggests its working – with one Operational Manager saying he had experienced the best weeks sales ever in one of the new Managers Stores!