Collaborating with Co-op’s, Apley Food Launches & Pulse Survey Changes

On Wednesday I had the pleasure of visiting the Lincolnshire Co-op Society to meet with their CEO, Alison Hands who took up her role there last April. I met with senior members of her team to listen to what they have been up to as well as hearing about some of the innovative new ideas they have. The Society owns a great deal of properties in the centre of Lincoln including their former department store, which they have converted to a technology hub for small businesses to use space for offices and meetings, there was an amazing array of companies developing brilliant new technologies. A great example of being a thought-leading pioneer in their area.

With Lincolnshire Co-op Society CEO, Alison Hands at their Lincoln HQ

A successful launch for Apley Food

Yesterday we celebrated the successful launch of Apley Food store in Telford. With a big promotion before the launch on social media and in the local area encouraging people to sign up to membership and join us on the opening day with a golden ticket giveaway. It was great to see over 200 customers waiting before the doors opened.

Apley Food launches! The store team including Store Manager, Denis Bell-Blake (centre)

A lucky golden ticket winner!

A successful launch with over 200 customers in attendance

That’s not all, our Little Pioneers mascots (Ping and Alice) also joined in, giving out fresh fruit and recipe cards to local children and promoting the new Your Co-op Childcare nearby which is due to launch later this year.

Doing good together with every shop, the launch activities continue today with the store hosting local charity partner, Telford Crisis Support. A key partner to the borough of Telford & Wrekin, providing emergency food, toiletries and clothing, they will meet and greet with customers and members to encourage donations in-store.

Little Pioneers mascots (Ping and Alice) join in, giving out fresh fruit and recipe cards to local children

I would like to give a big thank you to everyone involved in making this launch possible. It has been a real team effort from support to delivery, all of our teams played a part. Well done.

Co-op Holidays website launches

Over in Travel, we celebrated another milestone with the launch of the Co-op Holidays website last week. With media activity commencing this week on increasing traffic and leads, the travel team are seeing positive engagement with the first bookings coming in over the weekend for Spain.

Changes to the Colleague Pulse Survey

Measuring and acting on Employee Experiences is one of the key priorities when it comes to keeping your employees engaged, motivated, and most importantly, happy when they are at work. This is key to the success of any organisation and here at Your Co-op, we’ve been thinking very carefully about how we measure our Employee Experience, also known as EX.

We use the Colleague Pulse Survey to look at our EX and following your feedback, which indicated it was too frequent and repetitive, we have looked at ways to improve this.

So, beginning next week, the new survey will now take place every 2 paydays instead of every single payday allowing more time for positive action on feedback. We’ve also changed some of the questions as well as adding new ones – all to make the Colleague Pulse Survey more impactful and to measure the things that matter most to colleagues.

The first survey goes out on 7^th March and I encourage all colleagues to take part as this will ensure we have a broad view of issues that matter to colleagues, helping us to make more informed decisions. To find out more please share and watch the video below.