Out with our President and a trip to ASDA

Hello everyone,

This week you’ll hear about my visit to our Travel branch in Solihull, Energy Call Centre in Walsall and my trip to an event at ASDA's head office talking about food poverty.

Since writing last week I have attended meetings with the Board on Friday evening and Saturday morning where we worked through an extremely packed agenda discussing business performance and plan for the future.

Visits with our President

I was pleased to catch up with our President Helen Wiseman and visit some of our operations. We started at our Solihull travel branch which is trading under our new brand fascia. It was great to chat with Lyndsey and her team and discuss how they have worked to improve service and branch performance. We also met Lorna who had just started working for us.

New travel fascia, Solihul branch

 

Solihull team, Lyndsey back left and Lorna front left, Kathryn back right, and Helen front right

 

We then moved to Walsall where we dropped in on our Energy team at Hatherton road. There was a real buzz about the place with a large number of colleagues engaged in calls with customers. We looked at how Jo and the team set targets to improve service in areas such as how quickly calls are answered and whether issues are resolved first time.

The building is the former head office of the West Midlands Co-operative before the merger to create Midcounties and Jo told me that the room in which the customer contact team are now situated was formally the dance floor and bar area. We don’t have one of those at Warwick!

  Lionel Lincoln Lewis, Jo Bevington and Helen

We also popped into our funeral home at Walsall to chat with Chris Booth (Assistant Manager) and team and gave Helen a tour of the facility and then to our food store in Walsall town centre where Helen met Helen our store manager.

We use our store at Walsall as a ‘lab store’ which means we try out new technologies, systems and processes there and Helen and her team have done a great job in helping us to evaluate each and every initative. This has included self-checkout, Bakery printers, CCTV, digital access systems and they are just about to go live with a new colleague communication system using headsets.

Finally we popped into the Waterfront offices where Helen was given a guided tour by Alistair Rowland and introduced to our travel support teams and our new digital development team.

 

Meeting Mike Bird 

Later that day I had a meeting with Mike Bird who is the leader of Walsall Metropolitan Council. Walsall is an important part of our heritage and we are a big employer in the town. Mike and I agreed that we should work together to ensure we secure our presence there and look at how we might improve our facilities and work more closely with the local educational institutions to develop our colleagues of the future.

The Council building is Grade ll listed and a wonderful example of historical architecture having been built in 1902.

 Walsall Council Building, built in 1902

 

Combatting food poverty

On Tuesday I was in Leeds with ASDA, not for an interview! They hosted an event in conjunction with Business In The Community (BITC) to show the great work being done with FareShare and The Trussell Trust in combatting food poverty.

We are always happy to work alongside our competitors in looking to address these type of issues. FareShare is a charity which redistributes fresh in date and good to eat surplus from the food industry, which would otherwise go to waste. Last year they managed 16,992 tonnes of food which was enough for 36 million meals. They take food which is either over-produced or rejected at distribution centres due to mislabeling and other reasons and redistribute it to over 9,600 charities across 1500 towns and cities. This includes food from distribution centres within the national co-operative network. The charities include kids clubs, dementia clubs and organisations helping homeless people. The donations mean the charities don’t have to buy food and can devote more of their funds towards helping people.

 

 ASDA Head Office, Leeds 

 

The Trussell Trust runs a network of over 420 food banks, which work out of more than 1,200 centres across the UK and provide emergency food to people referred for support. In the last year their network gave 1,332,952 three day emergency food supplies to people in crisis. We have collection bins In our food stores and childcare nurseries and about half of these are managed by the Trussell trust. It was really useful for me to see how they manage their operation and importantly to learn about the additional services they offer people in need in areas such as debt management and skills for getting back into work. They are always looking for volunteers and have collection centres throughout our trading areas. Don’t forget as colleagues you are entitled to paid volunteering hours so it's worth considering, find out more here.

 

   

That’s it for another blog. I’m sure you all already know what to do if you want to get in touch, simply leave me a comment below. I hope you all have a great week and I look forward to sharing more with you next Friday.