People Services in a "Fuddle"…

Before you speculate as to how such a highly organized and efficient centre could be in anything that even remotely sounds like ‘muddle’ let me clarify…

This week a 17-strong gang of People Services ladies ran the race for life and, in order to raise sponsorship money, the rest of the team brought in a vast array of food, cake, sweets, drinks etc, hence the term "Fuddle" (food + huddle)! Then a contribution is made and we all tuck into each other’s culinary creations.

Have a look at the attached picture for the amount of food we had to contend with, and don’t believe the myth that sugar highs increase productivity…! We are still tallying up all the money raised and will be announcing our final figure next week. And we are still struggling to polish off the last of the food! So watch this space…

In other news, we have successfully migrated all 18,000 ex-United staff into our People Services centre, aside from some unavoidable tax implications that came with altering the pay cycle, this was "landed" smoothly and we are now moving into the "lessons learned" phase of the project in order to prepare us for the mammoth task of the Somerfield integration. We are liaising at all levels across all teams to pick up on the obstacles and issues that arose, and will utilise this information to make the next project an even greater success. Obviously, we are also taking time out to celebrate our successes, and the project team will have enjoyed a well-deserved night on the tiles by the time you read this…there may be a sore head or two in the office!

If you have followed this blog from the start (not difficult as this is week 2), you will know the distressing news of the Matt Chadwick, Business Support And Change Manager, and Britney Spears saga. Well, despite valiant efforts to keep it from us, it has been discovered he is off to see Take That this week. We live in hope that the intervention we have planned will break this terrible habit.

It is also fitting at this point to introduce you to our on-going Stakeholder visits initiative. With the placement of our Customer Service Management Champion, Dave ‘Champ’ Walker, these have stepped up about five gears! In the past three months we have had 152 visitors to the centre, covering participants from all of the businesses.

The positive feedback has exceeded our expectations and has been a tremendous boost for relations between the customer and the centre. It is evident that they recognise and fully support our continuing transformation and these will hopefully continue as word spreads. I will talk more about our increased engagement with the other businesses in the coming weeks…

Gary Booth
People Services
The cooperative