If anyone from Randy’s circle looks at these posts, please pass this along:
1: Since going to a Store Director/ Store Manager system most of your “important information” now goes to that level of management and dies. The days of information filtering down have ended. The days of your long time employees feeling like they are a part of something are over. Sure, we feel good about the jobs that we do and maybe our own departments, but that “employee ownership” has all but been lost. We have no ears on what’s going on other than your scripted videos which furthers our paranoia and distance from what is actually going on…and we have no voice, it is made very clear that orders are delivered from the office and that’s what we are going to do, no questions asked. If something doesn’t change, your stores will be nothing more than a bunch of glorified stockers that enjoy following preset instructions and are not capable of thinking for themselves… but hey, maybe that’s the plan?
2: Like previously mentioned, there is absolutely no way to communicate any feedback…whether it be a store level issue, a corporate level issue, an idea, a suggestion, a way to save money, a way to make more money,…nothing. Yes, you can go to a store director/ manager, but they wouldn’t dare risk their career to bring up something that challenges status quo. You can go direct to a person within corporate that deals with your idea but they’ll just tell you how they’ve tried but we’re shot down by those above them. There is no one willing to listen or that cares about what the average employee thinks, how they feel or how to make their jobs easier, happier or healthier.
3: Your pay scale scheme is crazy right now and literally you’d rather shoot yourself in the foot than take care of your current workers. At stores, new hires start out at 12-15/hr. Dept Managers now starting out at 20-25/ hr. Upper managers getting hired at salary for 60k+/ year although it seems like you’re trying to phase out this class of manager. 5 year + employees getting no wage adjustment…so you’d rather them leave and pay to train a new hire every 3 months to get paid the same. How about you take everyone’s years of service at store level and for all jobs Under store manager and turn that into a one time percent increase in pay to compensate them for their loyalty (work 15 years for Hy-Vee get a one time 15% increase in hourly rate). How about having a guaranteed minimum yearly pay increase after that. How about having a yearly retention bonus for those that stay for a whole year and pay this out yearly. As of right now if you’re a long time employee your pay has been frozen and you’re being told that you are at the high end of pay bracket for your job when the lowest level job has had about a 100% pay increase over the last two years. And at the corporate level you are adding all of these jobs but when you apply and think this is a way to move up you find that a: starting pay is less than what a store department manager makes and b: what store you work at makes all the difference on whether you get the job. Now once you do get in corporate the promotions and pay raises seem to be limitless. So, I ask you, as the company grows and becomes more efficient, figure out a way continuously reward loyalty at store level in a standardized and fair way and I guarantee you’ll reduce the need to replace so many jobs at any given time….it 100% will always cost more to find and train employees and pay them the higher wages than just bucking up and taking care of your current employees with experience.
4: While you find a lot of people on this site that don’t understand the true labor issues, and what it takes to run a profitable grocery store…the changes do make sense and it’s 100% necessary to cut the fluff. What doesn’t make sense are the inefficiencies that still exist making employees jobs harder and harder. We need to be investing 1000% of every dime to making sure that the current employs have everything at their disposal to make their jobs easier. Put literally everything at it. Self checkout should have been at every store years ago…digital price tags should be at every store…standardized base pricing…any part of accounting where every store has to make a certain report or plug in their own numbers should be streamlined at the office. If we’re going to work off planograms then have people making planograms that know what the heck they’re doing. We talked customer service down to one person, do postal where the post office has cut their operations down to nothing so we ARE the post office, yet we don’t have an automated answering system, and wonder why phones don’t get answered?
5: Overall the company can still be saved, you just need to figure out the secret sauce between communication, rewarding loyalty/ employee retention, and giving your employees all the tools to succeed in this new more streamlined work environment that will be necessary going forward.