Thank you to all Colleagues, Business Update, Colleague Protection

Thank you to all Colleagues, Business Update, Colleague Protection

Summary:

1. Thank you to all colleagues

2. Business update

3. Actions required

• Colleague protection

 

1. Thank you to all colleagues

We continue to get some really great feedback on the work that everyone is doing to help our members, our customers and, of course, each other. Two letters we’ve just received are slightly different to normal – in that they’re written by two youngsters from Longlevens junior school thanking our colleagues there for keeping the store open, helping to ensure that there’s enough for everyone and helping the local community. Whilst we all hope that’s what everyone thinks – it’s nice to be told, particularly by future co-operators!  

2. Business update

As we said yesterday, over the last few days many of us have been working to help other colleagues out in loads of different ways. That may mean working different shifts, doing different jobs or working at different sites. Whatever you’ve been doing, it’s made a real difference to our members and our customers, and it is genuinely appreciated.

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 in food, in funeral and in pharmacy. These could include for example those currently not working in pubs, clubs, manufacturing or similar. It’s great to know the vast amount of responses we’ve had so far and really great to welcome some new colleagues today. We continue to process through these as soon as we can and Clare Moore 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.

3. Actions required

Colleague Protection.

The safety and protection of all our colleagues continues to be the number one concern of the Executive Steering group and actions we are taking to do this are reviewed on a daily basis.  All our trading Groups have taken appropriate measures to help colleagues and customers, including arrangements for

• Increased cleaning (with additional materials allocated)
• Ensuring arrangements made for increased colleague hand washing
• Ensuring measures taken to implement social distancing at pay points

 

Obviously, these measures will be different depending upon which group you work in.

 

Can I ask that each and every one of us knows what the measures are for the Group or site they are currently working in, recognising that many of us are working in a different group at present to our normal one.

 

We’re also continually reviewing what else we can do to help protect everyone, and have additional measures being implemented later today and tomorrow. These include additional POS in food to ensure greater customer focus on maintaining social distancing; additional sanitiser and soap at sites; additional personal protection equipment supplies; further action to restrict the number of customers at any one time and additional cleaning guidelines and actions.

We’ll continue to focus on this and to make sure you are aware of the latest actions taken.

We want to ensure we are doing everything we can to help you at this time, and if you have any further ideas or comments then please, let us know using the comments section below or via your line manager. Thank you again for all YOUR efforts last week, it is appreciated.

 

John Street

Coronavirus Co-ordinator