Day 152 - 11 Jul 95 - Page 45
1 turnover because by that means you have a high proportion
2 of workers on the basic starting rate, since most of them
3 leave in disgust after a few weeks you never have to give
4 them any kind of pay increase; will you please comment on
5 that proposition?
6 A. The whole, sort of, ethos of the Company and myself as
7 a Store Manager would be that you would want as low a crew
8 turnover as possible, given that the lower the turnover the
9 lower the turnover of staff and, therefore, the better,
10 more experienced, more able crew members are working for
11 you and, therefore, you deliver a better standard of
12 service to the customer. So, we definitely did not want
13 high turnover. From a purely business point of view, the
14 higher your turnover the greater the cost of actually
15 maintaining a crew base.
16
17 So, for instance, if your turnover of crew member it costs
18 you all their training period. So really they are not an
19 awful lot of use to you for, sort of, three or four weeks.
20 There are all the costs involved with the three or four
21 weeks of training; there is the uniform; the more crew you
22 turn over some of them might forget to bring their uniform
23 back, so you have the cost of the uniform; the food they
24 eat while they are there. If you add all these -- the
25 orientation, two hours of a Manager's time for that; the
26 interview; if you add up the Manager's time, the training
27 time, the crew member's time and the pay and everything
28 else involved and the ancillary amounts, then the turnover
29 of one crew member can add up to quite a substantial amount
30 and would certainly not be what you would want as a
31 Manager. You would want to decrease that cost to a large
32 extent.
33
34 Q. Perhaps you have already said this, but is that the reason
35 why, if you are going to have a busy period like Christmas
36 and summer holidays, you stagger your recruitment?
37 A. That is right. It is better for the crew members
38 themselves and it is also better for us. They get more
39 attention, the training is of a higher standard and it
40 makes good financial sense.
41
42 Q. I pass to a slightly different topic. What methods of
43 recruitment -- I will preface that with another question
44 first, if I may. Did you ever have, while you were working
45 at Colchester, any recruitment problems, any difficulty
46 recruiting people?
47 A. No, we never; never had any recruitment problems.
48
49 Q. What sort of methods did you use to recruit people?
50 A. Generally, through the Job Centre; if we needed a
51 little bit of an extra push we would put a poster up in the
52 dining area, and then there are a lot on spec. contacts
53 coming in through, you know, people just walking up to the
54 counter and saying, "Have you got any jobs going?"
55
56 Q. Do you know whether, to an extent, you got people, as it
57 were, by word of mouth from one person to another?
58 A. Yes, sometimes, sometimes that would happen; like crew
59 members would ask their sister, to ask if their sister
60 could have a job or a member of their family or friends.
