Thumbs Up, Response to Colleagues & Colleague Protection

Thumbs Up, Response to Colleagues & Colleague Protection

Thumbs Up - #TeamMC

We know that you are doing an incredible job, going above and beyond to help our members, customers and fellow colleagues, whilst adapting to this ever-changing and challenging time. We continue to be really grateful for all you’re doing.

We want to share your stories of giving a thumbs up with other colleagues to keep morale high and to show that as co-operators we’re all in this together as team Midcounties. ‘Thumbs Up’ is our way of celebrating all your heroic efforts by sharing your great work and giving other colleagues the ability to like it.

We’ve already had some great examples, and these can be seen by clicking here.

 

Co-op News article

We are, as you know, part of a wider co-op movement in the UK. Co-operative News has published an article yesterday that brings together the actions that several co-op Societies have taken to help the community since the coronavirus started.
Phil Ponsonby, our Group CEO, is quoted in the article explaining what we’ve done and why we’ve done it. That article can be read here.

 

Responses to Colleague Connect

It’s been good to know that so many of you are finding this daily update useful. We know that this message is getting over 3,500 daily views – and helping you to remain updated. We are, as I hope you can see, responding as quickly and as thoroughly as we can to all comments posted on here and I hope those answers are also useful. Please remember that if it’s a specific question related to you, you can always go to the HR advice line on 01926 516469 or speak to your line manager.

 

Colleague Protection

The safety and protection of all our colleagues continues to be the number one concern of the Executive Steering group, and the actions we are taking to do this are reviewed daily.  All our trading Groups have taken appropriate measures to help colleagues and customers already, and we are also now taking additional actions as below. We have agreed a significant amount of emergency funding to ensure we can do this on your behalf.

- Social distancing:
This is one of the most important areas for all of us. We have given guidance to each trading site on this already and many measures have now been taken and implemented. These actions include limiting the number of customers at any one time in food depending upon the size of the store and taking similar measures in funeral and pharmacy branches. We have also taken measures to encourage customers to keep their distance in queues or walking round stores; encouraging payment by card rather than cash wherever possible; driving telephone contact rather than face-to-face across our Travel and Funeral groups. We have also now switched all our central support colleagues to remote working.

We have now actioned temporary closures for a limited time during the day in Pharmacy and some food sites to enable shelf-filling and cleaning whilst maintaining distance, we will communicate specific details to colleagues in each group over the coming couple of days.

- Cleaning:
As you know, we have increased cleaning depth and frequency across all our sites, and we are continually checking for further Government advice and guidelines. We’ve allocated out further supplies of both cleaning materials as well as 5-litre hand sanitiser and trading sites will receive additional quantities of this today, with further quantities on their way each week. These can be decanted to be used throughout each site. We are relaxing our position on disposable cups currently to ensure that there is no risk from colleagues using the same cup. Our Childcare Group is implementing a new type of mist cleaning in their most vulnerable NHS nurseries to ensure the very best protection for the children and our colleagues. Again, we’ll communicate specific details to colleagues in each group over the coming couple of days.

- Personal protection equipment measures:
The requirements for personal protection equipment and appropriate measures that we have then taken are different from Group to Group. Actions that we have taken so far include the allocation of additional supplies of soap and sanitiser as well as gloves to food stores that will be received by the end of this week, as well as sourcing facemasks for colleagues across our groups.

We have also now agreed a significant amount of emergency funding for protective screens at counters, with the first being installed on Friday this week.

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. That includes our procurement team working really hard to source materials from both existing and new sources. We’ll continue to focus on this and to make sure you are aware of the latest actions being taken.

 

Thank you!
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, it is appreciated.

 

John Street

Coronavirus Co-ordinator