Executive Colleague Council & Milan Visit

Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s blog.

I want to begin by saying thank you to everyone who read and commented on my blog last week ‘In remembrance of co-operators in WW1’. In the blog I offered any colleagues who were interested the opportunity to research the names on the Roll of Honour and produce an interpretation board to display with it. I’m delighted to say that this work will be shared by two colleagues - Georgina Ratcliffe, Ranging Assistant Analyst, and Cheryl Tree, Deputy Head of Colleague Development and Performance, who both work for Food Retail. They will now work with our Communications Team to do the research and I will keep you informed of their progress. Our design a Poppy competition with schools also proved very popular and the winner was Shrubland Street Community Primary School in Warwickshire who won £500 to spend on history resources. Co-op News featured some of the pupils designs in an article which you can read here.  

This week’s blog covers my first Executive Colleague Council Meeting, my visit to Milan with the ACS to see some retail stores and my visit to some of our Travel branches and Walsall office.

Executive Colleague Council meeting

It was really great to see we achieved our highest ever colleague engagement score in the last survey. However we need to ensure we look behind the numbers and work with colleagues to see what we are getting right and wrong. Colleague Councils are important in this process and I attended my first Executive Colleague Council meeting on Monday with reps from all of our businesses and central offices. Whilst every trading group have their own individual Colleague Council meetings every quarter, we also hold Executive Council meetings twice a year to discuss any items that affect the whole Society or have an impact on more than one group. Topics at this meeting included: holiday entitlements, seasonal working arrangements and security for colleagues across the different businesses. We also discussed how customers are still confused about the membership cards of different coops.

Milan visit with ACS (The Association of Convenience Stores)

This week, I was fortunate enough to be invited to Milan, but unfortunately not for a holiday! I was given the chance to visit some great retail stores by the ACS and look at how they are innovating for the future. It was a walking tour and although it was quite wet it was worth it! I'm pictured below with the rest of the group. 

The first store we visited was imagined by Carlo Ratti, an Italian architect, in collaboration with Coop Italia. It is a Supermarket of the Future which brings sci-fi interactivity to the daily experience of shopping. Fresh produce and deli products are displayed in neat angled boxes and displays; like we are used to – but it’s when you look up that things start to look different. Slick, digital screens hang overhead, offering interactive, educational displays with detailed information about every product on display. 

Using Xbox Kinect technology, customers simply point to learn more about particular foods, their nutritional information, and how and where they were grown and harvested. As a business who are passionate about food provenance and transparency, especially with our work with Best of our Counties and Happerley, I found this extremely interesting and exciting for the future.

One of our next stops was ‘Urban Life’ a concept by Carrefour Express. 

It is not only a supermarket, but also includes a dining area, a lounge bar with over 200 Italian and international beers (unfortunately I didn’t have time to try one!) and a co-working space to be able to work in comfort or spend time relaxing. 

The final store I want to talk about is ‘EATALY’. 

During my visit, I found out more on EATALY’s brand. It’s about Italian food, but they also highlight the Italian culture and history of food and wine, and the positive influences Italian cuisine has gained from abroad (including tomatoes and corn coming from America). 

Their main goal is to demonstrate that high-quality products can be made available to everyone; easy to find and at affordable prices. From the pictures above, you can see the wide variety of fresh produce and high-quality products that they have on offer. It was really great to hear about how they work towards achieving this goal and see how what we do with our brands, goods and services compares.

Travel visits

I also visited travel this week. Above is a picture of Leanne and Laura from our Brownhills branch. Leanne is a relatively new manager having recently joined us from Thomas Cook and we had a good conversation about the differences between both organisations. Also from our Brownhills branch is Tracy, pictured below with Rad Sofronijevic, our Chief Operating Officer of Travel, who has recently completed her 30 years’ service. Congratulations Tracy! 

I then visited our Waterfront Office, where I met with some of our Personal Travel Advisor team. Samantha (far right in the picture below) is one of our PTA’s who work in partnership with us and usually from home, so it was great to be able to meet her and some of the team who directly work with our PTA’s. 

(from L-R: Vicki, Carol, Karen and Sam)

I am working with Alistair, Group General Manager for Specialist Retail, Rad and the team to develop the long term vision for our Travel business and it really helps me to gain an understanding of where we are today by visiting branches and the central support team at Walsall. Our travel team continue to deliver great results and we are opening new branches, but the potential changes from new technologies are profound. We need to understand how we shape our business going forwards to take the fullest advantage and deliver growth for the long term.

And finally, congratulations to all involved in the conversion and opening of our latest store at Kineton in Warwickshire this week. It looks like a great little village shop!