Although I am now retired I had contact with the highest levels of Woolwoths management since the 1970's. I was enthusiastic in taking investors to meet with senior managers and welcomed at the store level to see new developments first hand. Not all has gone well over subsequent years but the links between head office and stores no longer seem adequate. What a pity.
About 5 years ago now, they restructured the above store management set up.
There was around 15 stores in an area with an area manager who reported to a regional manager, with 6-8 areas per region, and the 10 regional managers reported to the head of supermarkets.
They joined the regions into states with the areas managers reporting to 5 state managers (WA, SA/NT, VIC/TAS, NSW/ACT, QLD) reporting to head of supermarkets.
Around 3 years ago, the state teams complained they were overwhelmed so they changed it again. They dissolved the areas and created groups and zones. 6-8 stores per group with a group manager, with 5-7 groups reporting to a zone/"operations" manager and 4-6 zone managers reporting to state. With fewer stores in each group then in the old zones, the group manager is in each store more often. This leads to more distractions preventing department managers from getting their own work done.
Their solution to a perceived commutations problem was to create another layer of management, which in turn has created more problems at the store level.
Their other solution was to set up 3 different comms platforms to staff in general and department managers. Comms portal, store email accounts and a private company G+. (They issued every staff member a google account, only store managers and above with email active, and attempted to force everyone to sign up for G+. Making them understand that G+ and a google account were not the same thing and that they were using the wrong google authentication process - the one that checked for and forced activation of G+ - took quite some doing. "We don't condone forcing staff to use G+, but we've set the log in for internal sites that give access to rosters, store polices, training, etc to require G+ being active"
:evil
One example is the rewards cards. Head office wants a certain % of transactions to have a rewards card scan. Scan rate is monitored and the target forms part of the store ranking metrics and can impact the bonuses for bonus eligible salaried staff (this is why the check out operators are meant to ask customers for rewards cards each transaction). If the scan target is not met, the store gets in trouble (and in some cases can lead to the service manager and individual operators being put on improvement plans).
This ignores the fact that many customers simply don't want anything to do with the program. Some customers can get quite irate when asked about scanning their card or suggesting they should get one if they don't have one.
