Thank You to All Colleagues, Next Steps and Fast Track Recruitment
This article will take approximately 4 minutes to read
Published 19 Mar 2020 in Things that matter to you
Today’s update summarises our key activities and focus to date and gives specific guidance around:
1. Thank you to all colleagues
2. Business update
3. Actions required
- Redeployment of non-operational colleagues and your support for that
- Fast track recruitment and how we need your help
Thank you
I want to reiterate my message from yesterday, that we’re all incredibly grateful for the support you are giving to ensure our members and customers still receive the best possible service during difficult times.
Update
Clearly things are changing for all of us on a daily basis, and we continue to plan and react to this. We will continue to ensure all colleague communication is published on Colleagues Connect – and that’s the single source for you to receive all appropriate communication and Frequently Advised Questions. Similarly, all our customers and members can receive the updates on our website at www.midcounties.coop
In line with all businesses, our priority is on how we are serving our customers and focusing efforts on that. We are however also working on business plans aimed at ramping up activity as things start to calm down which they will at some point.
In Travel, for example, that approach means that we are taking immediate steps now to improve our capacity and deal with queries as safely and effectively as possible. To do that, we are temporarily closing our branches and increasing support for our central contact centre. However, we will re-open all these branches, with renewed vigour and maximum effort when things begin to return to some degree of normality. This will include increased marketing and media spend, the launch of our new website and the introduction of a brand new rewards package for travel customers. Phil has already said to all our travel team how brilliantly they have responded to support our customers and how grateful he is to them for their flexibility and support at this time.
Similarly, we are looking at adjusting the opening hours in some of our food stores to ensure we can continue to offer service to members and customers. We’re also looking at complementing our normal range with local suppliers to keep shelves full.
Both our immediate actions and plans for the future are helped as a Society by the fact that amongst our Leadership team we have real industry experts, who are part of the key industry trade groups. For example, Phil our CEO sits as a Board Director of FRTS; both Rupert and Phil are key members of the Association of Convenience Stores; Alistair Rowland is chair of ABTA, Sally Bonner is a key member of the Early Years sector, Mark Adams is a longstanding member of the National Association for Funeral Directors and so on. That gives us real influence on behalf of you as colleagues and our members and allows us powerful insight into plans and activities.
We are using all these colleagues and groups at the moment to reflect your concerns and worries regarding the announcement yesterday of school closures. We need many of you to be recognised as key workers, whose children can still attend school, and we need to understand better the detail behind potential nursery closures. That will enable us to make the appropriate Society policy decisions for all of us as colleagues, members and customers. I’ll let you have more news on that as soon as we can.
Actions required
As I noted yesterday, there are two key actions I need your help with.
1. We have created a team that are assisting the business in redeploying colleagues who are currently performing non- operational roles, into areas of the business who urgently require support. Tarra Simmons is leading this project and we would ask that all colleagues involved give their full support to Tarra and her team in being as flexible as possible with this. Those affected will receive notification later today and tomorrow.
2. We are also really ramping up our efforts at fast track recruitment to ensure we get as many additional people as we can to help us out. These could include for example those currently not working in pubs, clubs, manufacturing or similar. It’s great to know that we’ve had almost 900 responses so far in less than 24 hours! We’re processing through these as soon as we can and Clare and the HR team are doing a fantastic job with that.
If you know any individuals looking for short term work or any companies looking to redeploy their staff please ask them to email their details (including CV if they have one) to careers@midcounties.coop
We continue to help support the most vulnerable in our communities and it’s good to see so many people helping neighbours, friends or relatives. We have called for volunteers in the community to help support the foodbanks and distributing products to those who use them.
As we said at the start, many thanks for your continued hard work and support. This is genuinely appreciated. As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback, which can be left at the bottom of the page as a comment.
Read some great feedback from our Stanford store:
John Street
Coronavirus Co-ordinator