Dialogue: Good for business when staff balance work and life

By MARY MARSHALL*

Work and life balance is one of Woolworths' principal organisational values, chiefly because the company recognises that its need to succeed as a business has to be balanced with the needs of its team members. Satisfied team members are the key to the company's success as they talk to customers, suppliers and each other.

People work for different reasons: for some every dollar is needed to put food on the table; for others social interaction is their main reason for working. In our industry, the latter are most often women with grown-up children who can afford to be fussy - what matters most to them is a positive work environment.

Supermarket employment is also attractive to women because they can start with night work and move to day shifts as their children get older. Some of these women have moved on to be team leaders and store managers after going on our leader development course. So we have made a deliberate choice to lead the supermarket industry in terms of wages and policies, despite the constraints common to the industry such as tight margins and the sheer size of supermarket operations.

Woolworths alone employs more than 9500 people nationwide in 81 supermarkets, two meat-processing plants, three warehouses and one support office. The implications of this are apparent when you realise that even a seemingly easy policy such as Christmas gifts for all staff costs the company $132,000 a year.

Flexibility in work hours is also difficult to offer compared with other industries. Supermarkets are open long hours, most stores and warehouses operate seven days a week and some stores trade round the clock. There are only three-and-a-half days a year that stores do not open.

Saturdays and Sundays are the busiest days and also the days that people often have other commitments to family, community and leisure. So the majority of team members cannot work from home and have to work specified hours.

However, Woolworths has tried to align its work-and-life initiatives as much as possible with its company values of being fair, honest and consistent; embracing creativity and innovation; and celebrating life and achievement.

We were very sympathetic to the introduction of a domestic leave policy for a number of years, but with tight margins in the industry had to wait until it was affordable.

The new policy now applies to all team members under the supermarket contract but not to distribution centres, although these do have longer sick-leave provisions.

We've had an open bereavement policy for the past four years and although there were initially fears of professional funeral attendees, this has not eventuated. In fact, there have been very few abuses.

In areas where there are a high number of Maori employed, the team has got together to see that the needs of the workplace are met while letting team members meet their personal and cultural needs, and everyone has learned that both needs can be met adequately.

There are clearly measurable business benefits to the company from these work-and-life initiatives and others such as its student employee scheme, which has been operating since 1996.

It promotes students transferring to stores in cities where they study during their academic year, then back to their home-town stores in their holidays.

Stores in university cities often experience a drop in trade during holidays while there can be a short-term demand in other areas, so the scheme's introduction was to minimise team turnover while allowing team members to move into developmental roles throughout the country.

*Mary Marshall is the employment best practices manager for Woolworths.