Posted Date: 3/11/2011
Grocer Raises Retention Rates
By Adam Blair
When you’re managing a workforce of more than 10,000 people, even a small.jpg?width=150&height=100)
improvement in your talent management processes can have a big impact. United Supermarkets focused on one key performance indicator—making sure all new employees receive effective training/orientation when they start on the job—and got a big result: new hire training costs decreased $120,000 for a three-month period compared to a similar period prior to the tighter tracking.
Other improvements, including the addition of online training and less paper-intensive employee review processes, have helped United lower its employee turnover rate dramatically—from 74% in October 2008 to 51% by October 2010.
Better Tracking Boosts Employee Retention
United Supermarkets, which operates 50 stores in north and west Texas under the United, Market Street and Amigos banners, focused on new-hire orientations because they were strong indicators as to whether an employee would stay on the job for at least 90 days. The 90-day mark is itself a strong indicator of employee retention.
Remembering the business maxim that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, United began by improving its tracking of which employees had actually received their new hire orientations. These orientations take place at individual stores, and with some located as far as 350 miles apart, keeping accurate records had been a challenge. Just over three years ago, United began using the Cornerstone Learning Management System (LMS) to create more accurate records.
“We felt that effective orientations would help with 90-day retention rates, and the change was significant,” says Tom Weis, United’s director of training and development. “I wouldn’t attribute all of it to the orientations, but the simple fact that we were recording it moved the needle significantly.”
United’s 90-day retention rates climbed from 57% in 2009 to nearly 80% in 2010, and the higher retention rates contributed to lower new hire training costs, to the tune of $120,000 for the summer period, according to Weis.
Moving Training Online
A year after deploying the Cornerstone LMS, the retailer added the company’s Performance Management suite. Managers conduct performance reviews for both salaried and hourly employees, and the Cornerstone system removed “paper packets and lots of e-mails” from the review process. “The managers were a bit resistant at first, but within six weeks they were sending us thank-you notes,” says Weis.
United has also invested in learning kiosks, which it placed in all its stores during the past year. Employees can use the kiosks to take online training courses and managers can access reports. The Cornerstone applications are delivered via an SaaS model, which takes the load off of United’Training improvements help United Supermarkets lower turnover from 74% to 51%s servers. United has also tailored the Cornerstone system to its own needs, branding its training programs as United Spirit University.
The Cornerstone systems have quickly become an important tool for Weis’ training and development team. When United needed to train everyone on a new product labeling system, the team used a 15-minute animated PowerPoint with an audio track and an embedded video. Making this presentation available online “versus having to get people together and have a 30-minute meeting to explain it cut the cost of training 10,000 people on the new system in half,” Weis reports.
Several months later, when United offered a refresher course on the labeling system, Weis used the Cornerstone system to create a 10-question quiz for those that had already been trained. “People took the quiz, and if they got 80% or higher, they didn’t need to take the refresher course,” he notes.