Tesco.com - Competition Commission

Listening to our people

We are the largest private sector employer in the UK with over 260,000 staff. Our people make Tesco a success and we know how valuable their feedback is. There are many ways in which our people can share their views. For example, we hold Staff Question Time sessions so they too can share their views. It helps us to understand their opinions and experiences to help them serve our customers better.

Our good relationship with our union partner the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) provides a valuable way to capture the considered opinions of our people across the company. The Tesco/Usdaw Partnership is the biggest single trade union agreement in the private sector and staff forums are part of our agreement with Usdaw. They are held in all stores three times a year and enable our staff to give direct feedback on the things that matter to them.

Over 5,500 members of staff in the UK are on a development programme designed to give them the skills and experience to move to a bigger job. We have invested in over 3,000 new management roles in the last year to continue to deliver Every Little Helps for customers.

Sharing in our success

Through our incentive schemes, over 165,000 of our people have a personal stake in Tesco’s future. In May 2006, £78 million worth of shares were given to 180,000 staff as part of our Shares in Success scheme – all staff with more than one year’s service received shares worth 3.6% of their salary. In addition, we offer a ‘Save As You Earn’ scheme to enable staff to buy shares at a discounted price as a medium or long-term investment. Around 40% of staff take part, and in February 2006, shares worth £111 million were paid out when the scheme matured. Our third all-employee scheme is called ‘Buy As You Earn’. We have over 35,000 staff currently using this scheme to buy Tesco shares from their pre-tax salary, allowing them to become Tesco shareholders in a tax efficient way.

All our employees are able to join our award–winning and well–funded defined benefit pension scheme which allows members to build up a pension based on their earnings and service. This makes it an attractive scheme for part–time as well as full–time employees. Tesco pays in around double the amount that staff contribute, making our scheme excellent value for money.

Our people survey

Every year all our people are also invited to take part in our staff Viewpoint survey giving our people the opportunity to express their views on almost every aspect of their job. Last year 221,507 of our people completed the survey. We use Viewpoint to make sure we are working on the right things for our people, just as we use feedback from customers and suppliers to improve our offer for them.

What we have learned

Analysing Viewpoint data makes it far easier for us to identify and address issues that are important to specific groups of staff. We can also gauge the attitudes of various groups of staff towards a particular issue, such as pay, or the level of support they’re receiving from their managers. For example, we can see from the data those things that matter most to night-workers, or particular problems faced by staff that are working part-time. So we can tailor our employment environment at Tesco to suit the needs of different staff segments e.g. we are able to analyse staff feedback on a store-by-store basis and provide line managers with reports on how their staff are feeling. Whether you are a general assistant in a store, or someone at management level, whether you work at a distribution centre or in our office you can provide helpful feedback. We can then make sure that our plans are aligned with what our people are telling us.

Happier staff means better customer service

The data from Viewpoint has enabled us to react quickly to issues and implement changes that have subsequently delivered benefits for staff - and ultimately customers. Recently we recognised that workload was becoming an issue for staff in some of our stores, particularly around the busy Christmas time, and this led us to introduce a programme called ‘reducing vacancies’. By tracking the data from a subsequent Viewpoint survey it was clear that we had been successful in addressing this issue. It also led to the creation of an additional 12,000 temporary jobs the following Christmas.

One of the things that comes through very strongly in Viewpoint is that customer service is very important to our staff. We know that many of the improvements we make to the working environment translate into a better experience for our customers, with all the benefits that follow. Listening to our people and supporting their needs helps us to provide a better service for our customers so we all benefit.