... and that is you get to get away from your department for sometimes almost an hour and eat free food while still getting paid. That's all that's good about being on either one of those teams.
The STAR Safety team is useless. I know every Kroger store must have one, but what good is one if safety hazards aren't addressed even after coaching observation after coaching observation is turned in? In the produce department in our store, walk through it, and most of the time, there will be water on the floor. The produce department head has even been "coached" by members of the safety team and his attitude is he doesn't care. On the front end, courtesy clerks listen to music when out on the lot and look down on their phones while walking without looking even after being told not to by both supervisors and safety team members, yet they still do it. We accomplish either very little or nothing as a safety team. The co-manager at my store in charge of STAR says all that we can do is keep turning in coaching observations and if he receives enough of them, it would be grounds for disciplinary action, but as of yet, I don't believe anyone has been written up.
Culture Council is just an insult to us employees. It's designed to make it appear that management/corporate cares about employees' opinions when clearly it's all about the bottom line regardless of whether employees are happy or unhappy. Culture Council is not just there to improve the customers' shopping experience. It's also supposed to be there for the employees. Culture Council has tried to make it so that employees are rewarded for giving great customer service by doing such things as making so if you get your name mentioned in a customer survey where the customer rates the store a "5", you would get a free meal from the deli. Well, the free meal tickets would be written up, but sit upstairs, somewhere, and rarely get handed out to employees. Guess it was too expensive to give us a free deli meal for giving great customer service. Same with the R.A.C.E. cards. Sit upstairs, never get passed out. That's why we don't care as much as we used to when it comes to pleasing the customers. No appreciation and no incentive. Maybe if management did some little things like keep up with the free deli meals/R.A.C.E. cards, we'd be happier and work harder, but Culture Council can't do anything about it, so we choose not to care when management or our CSM goes on and on about the receipt tracker score and how 8 in 10 customers need to be highly satisfied.
Maybe if we were highly satisfied with our jobs, we'd care, but management and the department heads don't care if we're highly satisfied employees, so why should we care?
... and that is you get to get away from your department for sometimes almost an hour and eat free food while still getting paid. That's all that's good about being on either one of those teams.
The STAR Safety team is useless. I know every Kroger store must have one, but what good is one if safety hazards aren't addressed even after coaching observation after coaching observation is turned in? In the produce department in our store, walk through it, and most of the time, there will be water on the floor. The produce department head has even been "coached" by members of the safety team and his attitude is he doesn't care. On the front end, courtesy clerks listen to music when out on the lot and look down on their phones while walking without looking even after being told not to by both supervisors and safety team members, yet they still do it. We accomplish either very little or nothing as a safety team. The co-manager at my store in charge of STAR says all that we can do is keep turning in coaching observations and if he receives enough of them, it would be grounds for disciplinary action, but as of yet, I don't believe anyone has been written up.
Culture Council is just an insult to us employees. It's designed to make it appear that management/corporate cares about employees' opinions when clearly it's all about the bottom line regardless of whether employees are happy or unhappy. Culture Council is not just there to improve the customers' shopping experience. It's also supposed to be there for the employees. Culture Council has tried to make it so that employees are rewarded for giving great customer service by doing such things as making so if you get your name mentioned in a customer survey where the customer rates the store a "5", you would get a free meal from the deli. Well, the free meal tickets would be written up, but sit upstairs, somewhere, and rarely get handed out to employees. Guess it was too expensive to give us a free deli meal for giving great customer service. Same with the R.A.C.E. cards. Sit upstairs, never get passed out. That's why we don't care as much as we used to when it comes to pleasing the customers. No appreciation and no incentive. Maybe if management did some little things like keep up with the free deli meals/R.A.C.E. cards, we'd be happier and work harder, but Culture Council can't do anything about it, so we choose not to care when management or our CSM goes on and on about the receipt tracker score and how 8 in 10 customers need to be highly satisfied.
Maybe if we were highly satisfied with our jobs, we'd care, but management and the department heads don't care if we're highly satisfied employees, so why should we care?
Both of those store groups have always been pretty damn useless. A couple of points to share :
STAR at FredMeyer seemed to at least be able to get safety issues fixed. The "coaching" was supposed to be done by department management anyway, so I'd usually get a stack of STAR cards and be expected to turn in at least 3 a period, good or bad observations. I trained my people properly so it was always good observations. Usually STAR wasn't necessary to get something fixed, store management would *usually* do something about it. I wonder if this has something to do with FM stores being very high volume on average. Even the slowest stores do over 350k a week, most get up over 750k-1m. And theres 130 of them. So there may be more repair budget than for stores in areas with Walmart competition, and lower volumes across a whole district.
Cultural Council...HAH. Nobody ever listened or implemented anything they ever came up with. A good friend of mine was on the store council, and got selected to be on the district council. Concerns were always viewed as something that wasn't within their perogative to do anything about. The problem wasn't that the district HR coordinator, or even the division HR head wasn't agreeing with some of the suggestions and wanted to implement them, it was that everything had to be sent along to Kroger HQ in Cincinnati and they would never approve anything that cost money. And they could care less about us stores out in the PNW, we keep bringing in enterprise-leading results in every category. So they are smart not to screw around with operations as much as they could, key retailing aside. But other than that they don't really do anything in return.
That's pretty ****ty for not handing out rewards and whatnot. FM doesn't have much, but if you get a 100% on a secret shop, you got a $5 gift card, and there was a monthly drawing for everyone who got a $5 card, your name was put in to get one of a couple of $25 cards. They'd get handed out monthly, with thanks from your store director in a huddle, usually.
They really miss the boat on employee motivation. Working at Whole Foods, they generally do such a better job of it. Mostly with the gainsharing program, knowing that your hard work usually does lead to extra money monthly. But Kroger wants to do away with all employees anyway, so why care?
We have something called the inclusion council, this has been awhile but in our break room our HRC (now they call them ARM's) was getting drinks and food and I said ohhhhhhhh look. He said no no no no no these are for the "inclusion meeting" and I said to everyone in our break room DON'T EAT OR DRINK ANYTHING these are for the inclusion meeting and we're not included.
All those meetings are just an excuse to sit around and eat food, a few days ago I had to make up an iced cookie platter for some huge meeting that only dept. heads and other leads were invited to. It didn't take long at all but still, where's my free cookie? :P
useless. i recently was reluctantly included in the cc group by my manager. it's just a 'lady' fest. they talk about things not relating to anything they're supposed to talk about and they always get side tracked. & the same things are always repeated. I'm just sitting there...eating the free stuff. Sucks. I feel bad getting out though guilt problems.
guilt problems.
