Grocery Station was started off by Michelle Frogman in 1972 as a single store mom-and-pop shop for selling groceries. The Grocery Station, at that point, attracted clientele because of Frogman’s vivacious nature and the quality of groceries that the store offered.
It was Wendy’s travails as a single mother, who was balancing home, job, and baby, when this need of groceries delivered at home, created the Grocery Station’s USP (unique selling preposition) of convenience delivery. Convenience delivery was a service offering wherein customers could place an order over phone and pay for it using a card, and the groceries that they would have ordered would get delivered at their door-step, free of cost, at a time chosen by the customer. This was a kind of a revolution in the local community and further boosted Grocery Station’s business, which finally grew to 25 stores across three cities.
What stands out at each of the stores is the vivacity of the staff in engaging with the customers. Over a period of time stores had moved beyond just groceries and now stocked durables and toys. Every salesperson in the store was trained in assisting customers in all sections of the store. They were even trained to demonstrate the durables while also being able to talk convincingly about each product on the grocery shelves. Any walk-in was warmly greeted, engaged and helped. The store assistants even helped senior shoppers with their load!
While this happened in the store frontend, the backend too developed well. Technology was well integrated into the store operations, active and passive radio frequency identification devices (RFID) were extensively used to ensure zero stock-outs assisted by a fleet of over 20 different sized cargo vehicles that picked and moved goods between the warehouse and stores.
Senior Frogman’s son had recently graduated out of a B-school and joined the team as the Senior Vice-president and who immediately verbalized a vision of setting up 250 additional stores across the length and breadth of the country.
There were several challenges that Grocery Station now faced in scaling up the operations. The key differentiator was people. So far youngsters were personally screened by the Senior Frogman and handpicked for different positions. They were groomed by the Senior Frogman personally and were tested until they met his demanding standards and only then deployed in the stores. It was a well-tested mechanism and worked very well.
However opening 250 outlets meant recruiting and training close to 5000 people in a span of 1 year, training them and deploying them. And each of them had to meet the Senior Frogman’s unwavering standard, which he would never compromise on, and it is reasonable not to do so.
As a Consultant brought in to advise Grocery Station on recruiting such a vast pool of talent, training them and creating engaging strategies the following recommendations are being made:
Recruit only legally employable people – though there is a temptation to cut costs and recruit illegal immigrants – it would be against the value system and the image of Grocery Station.
Recruit only those people with minimum educational qualifications as set out by the Job Descriptions with the required skills.
Attitude is the key deciding factor in all recruitments and all people coming in to the organization must be highly customer oriented and empathetic to their needs. However well qualified with a great attitude, if they lacked this streak, even for a back end position, they must not be recruited.
The Grocery Station will set up its own learning center as a separate center of excellence with a model store in its campus to train new recruits on customer management, sales techniques, positive attitude, Grocery Station way of work and life, importance of being self, customer oriented leadership, service levels among other softer aspects of Grocery Station way of doing business. It would also train people on technology aspects of business as relevant to the particular job position on recruitment. Only those who manage to get certified would be on-boarded and others would be let go. This is definitely an expensive proposition but is the only way to ensure continuity of the integrity of Grocery Station’s culture, values and customer centricity.
Possible employees would be sourced only through recruitment advertisements that would be conducted in a phased manner in different cities about 180 days ahead of the store opening as per a project plan.
What Senior Frogman started – greeting each employee on his birthday, would continue now, albeit by giving a personally signed greeting card on the birthday and would be coordinated by the HR team. Additionally each employee would be given a gift hamper every New Year. This would be in additional to all other financial, and health benefits.
The crux of the recommendations is essentially to maintain the culture and customer centricity in high fidelity across all the stores.
A customer walking-in to any store anywhere must perceive no difference in service and even experience!
References
HR Focus. (2014). Social Media Strategies in Recruiting, hiring Pose Legal Risks for Employees. HR Focus.
Jon E. Lervik, R. P. (September 2005). Implementing Human Resource Development Best Practices: Replication or Re-creation? Human Resource Development international, 8(3), 345-360.
Ketsaraporn Suttapong, S. S. (2014). Best Practices for Building High Performance in Human Resource Management. Global Business and Organizational Excellence, 39 - 50.
Looa, L.-S. B.-H. (2013). Human Resource Management Best Practices and Firm Performance: A Universalistic Perspective Approach. Serbian Journal of Management, 8(2), 155-167.
