(Transcript) Matthew Speight: Leading the Way is the Co-op’s plan to transform the way we run our stores for our customers and members and most importantly make it simpler for our colleagues.
So the Co-op Digital team came to the Leading the Way program really early in the year and at the time, if I’m honest, I didn’t really understand how we’d work together as a team because it wasn’t clear and I didn’t know the Digital team that well, the skills and the abilities they’ve got on the team.
The first thing I think the Digital Team have done is they’ve opened my eyes actually having spent a couple years in the field, what I thought was was the truth about supporting colleagues and providing leadership is actually very different to what the reality was.
In fact we could have supported colleagues more and we should have done a better job and the Co-op Digital team have brought user-centric design to the Co-op. And they are fascinating as a team in terms of that passion to make sure that the user needs are at the forefront of any project. And before you scope an idea or a potential project they focus on what is it user need that you’re trying to fix.
My Schedule is a tool for colleagues that allows them to not only plan their holidays and look at their own shifts but start to think about working in other stores and it gives flexibility to colleagues. It disrupts the way we run our stores.
That’s one project, but this year we’re going to launch ‘How Do I‘: how do I do things, and that’s probably a real simple baseline of what the Digital Teams can do. They’ve taken our existing policies, 7,000 of them that are on Citrus which is our store process back office platform and simplified it. They provided a real simple menu option, that will improve the way our colleagues navigate problems in our stores. That will save time, it’ll improve compliance and it’ll also allow us to answer both colleague queries and customer queries in a much more efficient way.
And those sort of things together, My Schedule, How Do I, are the start. Then if you start to think about how we might run our stores and bring our IT data together, then you know digital gives the potential to really disrupt the way we run our stores and I’m hugely excited by some of those plans for next year.
I’m blown away by what they brought the program. They’re a fantastic team, hugely talented and they’ve made a real difference the program.
Matthew Speight
Retail Director, Support Centre