How Can’t-Close Retailers Are Keeping Workers Safe

How Can’t-Close Retailers Are Keeping Workers Safe

by Sarah Kalloch and Zeynep Ton - March 30, 2020

Workers at grocery stores, pharmacies, convenience stores, and other “can’t close” retail businesses are working overtime and risking their own health to keep the rest of us in food, medicine, and toilet paper. The companies they work for need to take care of them in order to keep both them and us safe.

It isn’t easy to balance well-stocked shelves with the safety of employees and customers, and there isn’t much time to learn. So there will definitely be mistakes along the way. But based on our research and work, we think the operational practices and values of the retailers we call “good jobs companies” can provide guidance to others. This is no coincidence. The various things good jobs companies do differently from other companies are all designed to make their frontline employees so valuable and productive that their contributions more than repay the greater wages, benefits, and training they receive. The resulting dedication and adaptiveness are exactly what companies need to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Below are some of the practices of good jobs companies - in particular, Costco, Mercadona, H-E-B, and Mud Bay - that can be adopted to keep customers and employees safe right now:

Focus and simplify to reduce workloads.

Some retailers are experiencing peak demand around the clock, which makes it hard to maintain social distancing and to make time for safety procedures such as sanitizing shelves. Normally, a dusty shelf may not be as important as 100 people lined up at the checkout. Right now, it is. So now is the time to reduce workload by rationalizing the product line, limiting shopping hours, and clearly explaining why both to customers (so they don’t bug the employees) and to employees (so they can explain to customers).

Mercadona, Spain’s largest grocery chain, has been instructing staff and using social media to tell customers to shop quickly - and with only one person per family in the store - and not to hoard. Costco closed its food court, optical, and hearing aid departments. It is not accepting returns on high-demand items like toilet paper, paper towels, Lysol, and rice - both to simplify work and to discourage hoarding.

Adopt clear safety standards.

Given the virulence of Covid-19 and the difficulties of maintaining and enforcing safety precautions, especially in retail stores with hundreds of anxious shoppers, reducing the risk to zero is impossible. That said, retailers need to be creating and communicating clear standards for sanitizing stores, distribution centers, and trucks; social distancing; handwashing and personal protection; surveillance to identify potential illness in employees; and new ways of working (for instance, switching from huddles to different modes of communication or creating smaller work groups in distribution centers).

Companies with high employee turnover and weak unit mangers with short tenures - a description that fits most retail chains and online retailers - will have a hard time adhering to safety standards. Good jobs companies, on the other hand, already excel at creating and conforming to strong standards by using input from the front lines and then providing those front lines with the necessary tools and enough time. Costco, for example, has strong, empowered middle managers and dedicated frontline staff who all take high standards seriously. That puts Costco in a strong position now to enforce novel and strict standards related to closing every other register for social distancing and limiting the number of members who enter. At Mud Bay, a pet store chain in the Northwest, door greeters ask customers to wash their hands at an outdoor station before entering the store and to stay six feet apart once inside.  Staff are empowered to ask a customer who refuses to practice social distancing to leave the store.

Empower and continuously improve.

Covid-19 will call for new everyday work processes and will not wait around for a cautious rollout. The continuous improvement culture at good jobs companies enables them to innovate faster and better. Costco, Mercadona, and H-E-B, for example, are already putting plexiglass in checkouts to keep employees safe. Costco repurposed the plexiglass from seafood displays. Mud Bay quickly rolled out curbside pickup, which went from 0% of sales to more than 6% in five days. CEO Lars Wulff said his stores could do this quickly because of a stable workforce that is already empowered to make decisions. This is crucial because many stores have different setups and local customer needs.

Operate with slack.

Good jobs companies staff their stores with more hours of labor than the expected workload, which enables them to react to changes in demand or supply. Given the increase in customer demand and additional callouts due to illness, operating with slack is especially important now. It isn’t just Amazon that’s suddenly hiring in a big way.

Companies may also need to repurpose roles to create more capacity. H-E-B, a Texas supermarket chain, is adding an extra manager in charge of Covid-19 response who ensures the stores are sanitized twice a day, maintains regular food sanitation, and monitors lines at food counters and checkout to ensure social distancing.

Good jobs companies also operate with financial slack. This means making sure they have the money on hand to deal with unforeseen events. In 2008, when the world economy was collapsing, Mercadona had enough cash on hand to pay bonuses to its workers. Its leaders knew they were going to need to ask more from those workers as the company innovated to cut prices for struggling customers. Retailers are asking far more now.

Show respect.

Respect is not a luxury when you’re asking people to risk themselves. It is time for all retailers to show respect by prioritizing workers’ safety, offering decent pay and benefits, giving them the tools and resources they need to do a good job, and recognizing them when they do. Good jobs companies already do that, but Mercadona is now boosting pay by 20%, and Mud Bay, H-E-B, and Costco (which already has one of the highest wages in retail) are paying workers $2 more an hour during the crisis. An empowered Costco warehouse manager in Massachusetts is providing meals for his team. QuikTrip’s CEO is visiting stores to show solidarity, recognize good work, and communicate that their jobs are safe but adheres to recommended social distancing and sanitizing practices while doing so. Home office leaders at Sam’s Club are taking shifts in the stores to support their colleagues, which may also help them better understand the pressures of operating in this kind of environment so they can craft stronger policies moving forward.

Prioritize customers and employees over shareholders.

All of these interventions to keep customers and employees safe cost extra money in the short term. Mercadona is giving out gloves to customers and hiring private security guards to help with crowd control and take some of the load off store managers. Good jobs companies are able to implement these changes more quickly because they already have a culture of doing the right thing and prioritizing people over shareholders.

A Costco employee told us: “The dedication and drive that Costco employees have sets us apart from everybody else. During these times, our true colors have really shone.” That dedication and drive didn’t just spring up under pressure. They are the carefully cultivated results of a specific set of practices. If Covid-19 draws attention to the long-term value of good jobs practices, it will have had at least one positive impact.

Sarah Kalloch is executive director of the Good Jobs Institute, a nonprofit whose mission is to help companies thrive by providing good jobs. Follow her on twitter at @sarahkalloch.

Zeynep Ton is a professor of the practice at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and co-founder and president of the nonprofit Good Jobs Institute. She is the author of The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. Follow her on Twitter at @zeynepton.