The front lines
At Acme Markets — a subsidiary of the $37 billion Minnesota-based grocery store giant SUPERVALU Inc. since 2006 —
Spires keeps everyone focused on three basic goals that serve
as driving principles for the business: “We want to be the best
place to work, the best place to shop and the best place to
invest.”
Every collaborative project and every individual goal needs to
address one of the three main organizational goals. Spires says if
it doesn’t, it’s not worth discussing.
Spires places an emphasis on enabling the employees who
interact directly with customers and shareholders to take the
initiative and come up with ways to make the company a better place to do business. Those employees are the eyes and
ears on the ground for any business and are the people who
will be able to react quickly to the changing needs of the customer base.
For example, Acme faces a unique challenge in that the company must sell essentially the same products from city to city
and neighborhood to neighborhood but must also cater to the
specific needs of the local community.
Spires says in areas of suburban Philadelphia that have a
large Jewish population, Acme stores need to have a full-service kosher deli in order to best serve customers. Stores in commercial districts might need a large salad bar for the business
lunch crowd.
Giving managers on the store level the power to steer their individual stores didn’t happen overnight. Spires says it took
an extensive organizational restructuring on the operations
side.
“We set up our new structure in the organization, we restructured our operations team to afford those very close relationships with the marketing and merchandising people so we
could make sure that we are supplying the store managers
with what they say are their needs for their particular neighborhoods,” she says.
The ideas that form on the store level aren’t necessarily limited to one particular store.
Spires says if you allow ideas to well up within the organization, you’ll find that an idea that was formed in one area can
potentially benefit other areas of the company.
That’s why, whenever possible, Spires brings representatives
from individual stores together in face-to-face meetings. It’s an
opportunity for managers across the Acme chain to find out
what is going on in other locations, and perhaps form ideas for
improving their own stores.
“It’s amazing how many people are doing some best practices that we don’t even know about,” Spires says. “When people hear stuff from their peers at work and they get a live testimonial, it ignites them to go back and try that, it ignites their
thought process to say, ‘What can I do to better please customers, to get a better spirit in my store?’ It creates such wonderful momentum.”
The meetings have built so much momentum, Spires and her
team decided to formalize it into a council. In Acme’s
Associates Council, one representative is elected from each
store. Quarterly, all the store representatives meet with Spires
and her senior vice president of operations.
“The Associates Council gets to come in and tell us what is on
the minds of the people in their store,” Spires says. “What are
we doing, what aren’t we doing, what can we do better? It gives
our associates a way to know that they’re being heard, and it
also gives us an opportunity to get to our main source of contact with the customer and let our associates know what is
going on.
“The growth we’ve seen there and the communication that
takes place are doing wonderful things for our organization.”