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.

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