Tesco has recently announced that the brand is making some strategic changes to further simplify the business and this might affect jobs of 9,000 employees. “Since we launched our turnaround four years ago, we have built a stronger business focused on serving our customers. Whilst this turnaround continues, it does so in a competitive and challenging market. We’ve briefed our colleagues on some changes we’re making to our stores and offices to further simplify our business, so that we can continue to invest in serving our customers,” Tesco said in a statement.
Jason Tarry, CEO, UK & ROI said: “In our four years of turnaround we’ve made good progress, but the market is challenging and we need to continually adapt to remain competitive and respond to how customers want to shop. We’re making changes to our UK stores and head office to simplify what we do and how we do it, so we’re better able to meet the needs of our customers. This will impact some of our colleagues and our commitment is to minimise this as much as possible and support our colleagues throughout.”
Changes include the following:
Counters simplification
Over recent years, convenience and online businesses have continued to grow, as the brand has core grocery and fresh departments in large stores. Not only are customers shopping in different ways, but they have less time available to shop too – which means they are using counters less frequently. The brand will be making changes to the counters in large stores to ensure that they have the right offer for customers. It is expected that around 90 stores will close their counters, with the remaining 700 trading with either a full or flexible counter offer for customers.
Stock control simplification
As business changes, the brand is also changing the way they manage their stock. After a number of trials, they have found a simpler way to conduct store routines and will be rolling this out to all of the stores. These changes mean a significantly reduced workload, with fewer hours needed to complete the routines.
Merchandising simplification
The brand wants to make shopping with them even easier, and they are aware that when they move products around this can prove frustrating for customers. The in-store employees have expressed to the brand that they want to spend more time with customers, rather than moving products around the store. They have been working to reduce the amount of layout changes they make, so it’s easier for customers, and less work for in-store employees meaning fewer merchandising hours are needed.
Colleague rooms
Currently only one third of stores provide a hot food service and, over recent years, there has been reduced demand for this. Over the last three years the brand has been rolling out new self-service colleague kitchen areas in a number of stores, and they are now extending this to all remaining stores with a hot food service. This change will impact the people working in colleague rooms, who are employed by third party caterers, and the brand is working with them to provide as much support as they can.
Head office
The brand has completed a detailed review and this week they are talking to employees about changes in some of their head office teams, moving to a simpler and leaner structure, which will allow them to focus on supporting customers.
In-store bakeries
Contrary to media reports over the weekend, the brand has no plans to make any significant changes to bakeries this year.
“Overall, we estimate that up to 9,000 Tesco colleague roles could be impacted, however, our expectation is that up to half of these colleagues could be redeployed to other customer-facing roles. We are working with our third party providers to understand the impact on their staff in our colleague hot food service,” Tesco said in a statement.
