Archived Fundamentally changing how the floor is staffed?

[stinkeye]

Long time lurker, but I seldom post. I've come to realize what an amazing resource the TM's on this site are for gaining insight into the stores. With that said, I'd like some feedback on something I've been spending a great deal of time thinking about lately.

First off, "more payroll" is not an answer to what I'm asking. We all know that in an environment with declining foot traffic and online sales growing - there aren't likely to be any significant changes to the payroll plans stores are seeing come down from HQ.

So, the question is what can we do at store level to fundamentally improve our ability to keep the floor full, zoned, and most importantly service the guest? I'm looking for things you've thought about but never could get anyone to listen or leadership was just content to go through the motions and didn't care.

Bottom line as I see it, if we don't find our way back to a service oriented approach in everything we do - the future is not bright. I'd love to hear your ideas!

 

[Deli Ninja]

Good TMs are getting horribly burnt out and either not trying as hard as they normally do or are moving on to new jobs, leaving behind TMs who were only ever trained on how to do their jobs quickly, not well. If you're looking for some sort of solution, all I can think of is to coach, retrain, and (if necessary) fire people at all levels. Unfortunately, if Target can't attract new TMs who are committed to doing their job well, this will only make things worse.

Edit: I edited out a paragraph at the beginning of this, so the tone is weird. Sorry about that!

 

[HRZone]

Good TMs are getting horribly burnt out and either not trying as hard as they normally do or are moving on to new jobs, leaving behind TMs who were only ever trained on how to do their jobs quickly, not well. If you're looking for some sort of solution, all I can think of is to coach, retrain, and (if necessary) fire people at all levels. Unfortunately, if Target can't attract new TMs who are committed to doing their job well, this will only make things worse.

Edit: I edited out a paragraph at the beginning of this, so the tone is weird. Sorry about that!

At my store it starts with protecting our veterans. They should get priority for hours (although I disagree when a vet gets 40 and a new person gets 4 for a week. A 32/12 split or something along those lines is much more equitable.

We had a new hire who went to the bench in one month. She was hailed as the next big thing. She left our store after 4 months. Leadership put her on a pedastool but ignored people who have shown loyalty to the company.

As far as making our store look good. We all are crunched for hours but our ETL HR and STL agreed to focus on instocks. It's less busy now so things aren't just going to fly off shelves. They cut hardlines and softlines hours slightly to pad our instocks teams.

Now our shelves are full, capacities are fixed and the store looks great.

 

[stinkeye]

The store looks great, but does that drive sales more than say having 4 TM's on the salesfloor from 2-6pm? Or does beefing up in-stocks mean you only have 2 closers in SL on a Saturday night as opposed to 3 or 4 to help guests and drive sales? I guess that's what I'm trying to get at. Are we all too programmed to care about green metrics, and Out Of Stock scores, and RedCard goals - to remember that it really all ends and begins with the guest experience? Does the guest care if there are 34 Tide HE's on the shelf? They only need 2 so maybe it's OK that there are only 15 on the shelf?

 

[BigEyedPhish]

Most of my ideas were for Market (I was a PA, before Signing Spec). one was to keep all Fresh Meat Located as well as the Produce Cooler, and shooting POG Fills (Possibly for Dairy as well), everyday there was no C&S Truck, but especially the days before (we aren't FDC). In the end, this would of course mean bigger morning pulls, and that's it.

While helping immeasurably with FIFO, In-stocks, and straight up loss (QMOS), once the system caught up, I believe it would have actually gotten us smaller Food Trucks, as less would be thrown out, (Meaning less help needing to push said truck).

My Idea along this was instead of having 2 Sales Floor PA's we had 1 Sales Floor PA (who worked 6am-2:30 shifts (mainly) and 9am - 5pm shifts). Who focused mainly on Sales Planners, Couponing, TPC'ing, and shooting In-Stocks/PFresh order.

And having a BR/Logistics PA who worked 4am-12:45 shifts all the time. Non-Truck days, this PA would shoot/pull/push POG Fills for Meat/Produce/Dairy. They would also help just as much with Sales Planners/TPC'ing/In-stocks and the PFresh order. They would also run the Truck push the day they were scheduled...

I pitched this idea to my leadership, countless times, you can guess their response, now I am Signing Spec. 😎

 

[instockout]

cut down on salesfloor in the morning/early afternoon. have experienced team members become your instock team, and let them do research through out the store and cover salesfloor.

 

[instockout]

at my store we have one person come in for hardlines until around 1230ish then another one comes in at 12 till around 430 or 5. both those team members dont have to come in and just give two instock team members an eight hour shift. when it comes to the weekend, then yes you're going to need actual salesfloor people to be on the salesfloor because there will be too much traffic to do both instocks and salesfloor. but there are times at my store where hr doesnt schedule anyone in hardlines until thirty minutes before instocks leaves, just because she knows we are more than capable of handling the responsibilities of the salesfloor and instocks. the only time it gets a little difficult is when we have to pull our batches and we might be off the floor for thirty minutes or so. but most times there is multiple etls/stl in my store so they can easily cover calls or help guests for the time. now in no way is this perfect, the very obvious answer is to throw hours at the problem, but you stated you didnt want that as an answer. i understand that. target is still dealing with a lot of problems i believe, target canada tanked, pfresh stores arent seeing a huge profit regularly, and i was told that even supertargets were fairly lackluster. i honestly wish people at corporate would pay more attention to this site, because i have seen some amazing ideas come through these sites and i think the company could benefit a lot from listening to the people who actually deal with the day in and day out of the company.

 

[callmetaylor]

Good TMs are getting horribly burnt out and either not trying as hard as they normally do or are moving on to new jobs, leaving behind TMs who were only ever trained on how to do their jobs quickly, not well. If you're looking for some sort of solution, all I can think of is to coach, retrain, and (if necessary) fire people at all levels. Unfortunately, if Target can't attract new TMs who are committed to doing their job well, this will only make things worse.

Edit: I edited out a paragraph at the beginning of this, so the tone is weird. Sorry about that!

(This turned in to a super weird rambling rant. I didn't mean for it to come across quite as intense as it probably does!) 😳


AGREED!

There was a stretch of time where I was seriously considering leaving Target primarily because of the impact my horrible co-workers had.

My leadership is decent and I've got some great co-workers, but the bad ones ruined absolutely everything and seemed impossible to get rid of. They tainted the new TMs almost as soon as they started, so eventually I even lost hope with newbies.

Thankfully, they finally performanced out some of our worst offenders and things have improved exponentially. There are still some slackers who do nothing but talk, but they're in the minority now, and it's not impacting newer TMs nearly as much as it used to.

Literally every new hire we got either quit within a week or two, or was rendered useless because they spent too much time with our lazy TMs and picked up bad habits.


Target needs to demand excellence from their employees. They need to make their employees take pride in their work. There's way too much half-assed work and total loafing going on. I don't want to see the company get super strict/"scary" but as it's been mentioned numerous times on this board- the company is burning out their veterans and hard-working TMs, because we're left to pick up the slack. If everyone was expected to do their job, and do it well, everything would even out.


TMs in my store aren't held accountable nearly as much as they should be, but they're being held somewhat more accountable than they used to be and it's totally changed my attitude at work, because I'm not drowning in extra work. In fact, I'm able to seek out extra projects because I have extra time now that used to be spent undoing all of their mistakes. This is huge! Want to find more payroll? Make all of your TMs do their job and suddenly you'll be swimming in extra hours!


Also- get rid of the "absolutely no overtime throughout most of the year" rule. Focus on payroll in general, not overtime. If you're going to spend $20 does it matter if that $20 is spent on overtime or regular hours? Because I know without a doubt there have been times I've worked overtime and accomplished far more in my time than some of the lazier TMs would have done in twice the time, therefor actually saving the company money. This isn't a kiddie sports league- we don't need to make sure everyone gets a chance to play. Focus on results. It's not about rewarding good TMs/punishing bad ones, but making the most of the money the company is already so damn stingy with.

It blows my mind how the raises can be so low and they freak out over every minute of overtime, but they'll keep half-dead TMs on staff and keep giving them ~30hrs a week for years. CUT THE BAD TMs- you'll free up payroll, morale will improve, they won't infect new TMs, and your good TMs will probably be happy to pick up the slack.

We had a seasonal TM 2 years ago who most of my team agreed, the company would save money by paying her to just sit in the break room instead of "working." She was absolutely terrible- moved like molasses, got in everyone's way, and never put stuff where it belonged. She eventually walked out mid-shift one day, but there was no sign that she was going to be fired had that not happened. The company will pay someone like that $10/hr but can only find like 20 cents to give when raises come? 😵 Give me a break.

 

[instockout]

(This turned in to a super weird rambling rant. I didn't mean for it to come across quite as intense as it probably does!) 😳


AGREED!

There was a stretch of time where I was seriously considering leaving Target primarily because of the impact my horrible co-workers had.

My leadership is decent and I've got some great co-workers, but the bad ones ruined absolutely everything and seemed impossible to get rid of. They tainted the new TMs almost as soon as they started, so eventually I even lost hope with newbies.

Thankfully, they finally performanced out some of our worst offenders and things have improved exponentially. There are still some slackers who do nothing but talk, but they're in the minority now, and it's not impacting newer TMs nearly as much as it used to.

Literally every new hire we got either quit within a week or two, or was rendered useless because they spent too much time with our lazy TMs and picked up bad habits.


Target needs to demand excellence from their employees. They need to make their employees take pride in their work. There's way too much half-assed work and total loafing going on. I don't want to see the company get super strict/"scary" but as it's been mentioned numerous times on this board- the company is burning out their veterans and hard-working TMs, because we're left to pick up the slack. If everyone was expected to do their job, and do it well, everything would even out.


TMs in my store aren't held accountable nearly as much as they should be, but they're being held somewhat more accountable than they used to be and it's totally changed my attitude at work, because I'm not drowning in extra work. In fact, I'm able to seek out extra projects because I have extra time now that used to be spent undoing all of their mistakes. This is huge! Want to find more payroll? Make all of your TMs do their job and suddenly you'll be swimming in extra hours!


Also- get rid of the "absolutely no overtime throughout most of the year" rule. Focus on payroll in general, not overtime. If you're going to spend $20 does it matter if that $20 is spent on overtime or regular hours? Because I know without a doubt there have been times I've worked overtime and accomplished far more in my time than some of the lazier TMs would have done in twice the time, therefor actually saving the company money. This isn't a kiddie sports league- we don't need to make sure everyone gets a chance to play. Focus on results. It's not about rewarding good TMs/punishing bad ones, but making the most of the money the company is already so damn stingy with.

It blows my mind how the raises can be so low and they freak out over every minute of overtime, but they'll keep half-dead TMs on staff and keep giving them ~30hrs a week for years. CUT THE BAD TMs- you'll free up payroll, morale will improve, they won't infect new TMs, and your good TMs will probably be happy to pick up the slack.

We had a seasonal TM 2 years ago who most of my team agreed, the company would save money by paying her to just sit in the break room instead of "working." She was absolutely terrible- moved like molasses, got in everyone's way, and never put stuff where it belonged. She eventually walked out mid-shift one day, but there was no sign that she was going to be fired had that not happened. The company will pay someone like that $10/hr but can only find like 20 cents to give when raises come? 😵 Give me a break.

yesssss half my stores flow team is dead weight. 30-40% of the team carrying dead weight. even if they cut 20 percent of the dead weight and replaced with decent or great employees trucks would be getting done on time or early. same goes for most other teams at my store. i walk in back all the time to see salesfloor chatting away in the back, or backroom guys chatting. ive walked back there numerous times to see someone on my team talking with the receiving person, and i have had to pull them aside and let them know that its no acceptable. its insane, and annoying

 

[smashandthrash]

At my store it starts with protecting our veterans. They should get priority for hours (although I disagree when a vet gets 40 and a new person gets 4 for a week. A 32/12 split or something along those lines is much more equitable.

We had a new hire who went to the bench in one month. She was hailed as the next big thing. She left our store after 4 months. Leadership put her on a pedastool but ignored people who have shown loyalty to the company.

As far as making our store look good. We all are crunched for hours but our ETL HR and STL agreed to focus on instocks. It's less busy now so things aren't just going to fly off shelves. They cut hardlines and softlines hours slightly to pad our instocks teams.

Now our shelves are full, capacities are fixed and the store looks great.

My store protected top performers over veterans. Many top performers were veterans, but this was not necessarily the case all the time

 

[qmosqueen]

i think we need dedicated TMs for each area, they get 20 aisles and have to keep that area zoned and full.
So if Grocery is 40 aisles you need 2 TMs to keep it full and zoned all day long. No more mid day zone, it's and all day zone.
C is 40 aisles you need 2 TMs in that area.

 

[signingminion]

My biggest pet peeve is accountability. They built it into the damn things to work on and we still don't do it.

At other jobs as a manager if you slacked I'd send your ass home to think about if you really wanted a job. Here we just work around you. Ive got assholes making $14 an hour pushing a box every ten minutes and taking a bathroom break for thirty minutes every couple hours. But they will fuck up the line, I mean work the line for truck, so we keep them.

Fire people who don't work. Use the 90 days effectively.

 

[instockout]

i think we need dedicated TMs for each area, they get 20 aisles and have to keep that area zoned and full.
So if Grocery is 40 aisles you need 2 TMs to keep it full and zoned all day long. No more mid day zone, it's and all day zone.
C is 40 aisles you need 2 TMs in that area.

Sounds like that's a lot of tms and a lot of payroll. There's roughly 260ish isles, that's 13-14 salesfloor people at any given time. That's an enormous amount of payroll, unless I read your comment wrong.

 

[Tyrant]

The thing that stands out to me the most is Target is loading even more responsibilities onto TMs, without giving them anymore hours or increasing their payrate. The results are fairly predictable, most people aren't going to do that well being tasked to do more and get nothing in return. That's not even taking into account how much training new TMs are going to require to fulfill their duties and if it's anything like my store that trainer is going to be severely lacking themselves.

Just as an example, the flow team at my store all have "dedicated areas". Which they're supposed to zone, stock, backstock, shoot any outs, pull those outs and stock them as well as making decisions about endcaps (wtf?!?!) and flexing over holes. I'll tell you that my flow team literally never comes clean on a truck, so it's a complete mystery to me how they're going to fulfill all these other duties. Most of them don't even know how to make labels on a myDevice ffs.

There's a certain triangle of Cheap, Fast, Good. You get to pick two. Target already picked Cheap for you, by the way.

 

[instockout]

The thing that stands out to me the most is Target is loading even more responsibilities onto TMs, without giving them anymore hours or increasing their payrate. The results are fairly predictable, most people aren't going to do that well being tasked to do more and get nothing in return. That's not even taking into account how much training new TMs are going to require to fulfill their duties and if it's anything like my store that trainer is going to be severely lacking themselves.

Just as an example, the flow team at my store all have "dedicated areas". Which they're supposed to zone, stock, backstock, shoot any outs, pull those outs and stock them as well as making decisions about endcaps (wtf?!?!) and flexing over holes. I'll tell you that my flow team literally never comes clean on a truck, so it's a complete mystery to me how they're going to fulfill all these other duties. Most of them don't even know how to make labels on a myDevice ffs.

There's a certain triangle of Cheap, Fast, Good. You get to pick two. Target already picked Cheap for you, by the way.

Would never trust my flow team to shoot outs or pull, or for that matter backstock. Our brla would plummit

 

[qmosqueen]

Sounds like that's a lot of tms and a lot of payroll. There's roughly 260ish isles, that's 13-14 salesfloor people at any given time. That's an enormous amount of payroll, unless I read your comment wrong.

yeah that will never work just dreaming. maybe use all the flow TMs to unload the truck then take care of their 20 aisles. No that won't work either.

 

[Noiinteam]

It's not the quantity of tms, it's the quality.

 

[qmosqueen]

It's not the quantity of tms, it's the quality.

so true sometimes 1 good TM can do the work of 3 so so TMs.
other times 1 so so TM working by themselves get almost nothing done in 8 hours.

 

[Bosch]

It's not the quantity of tms, it's the quality.

Quality TM's get sick of cleaning up the mess. With no support from above you stop trying. Sorry but Target isn't going to change until its in bankruptcy.

 

[Him]

Quality vs Quantity. This can affect all across the board whether it is Tm's, Equipment, Payroll, etc. Also what I have seen best results from my time at Spot is Recognition. This might not seem like much for some, but to actually change a "so so" tm into a "Superstar helps everyone. Things will break. People will come and go. But if a store keeps these things in place, over a period of time, things work out.

 

[HRZone]

The store looks great, but does that drive sales more than say having 4 TM's on the salesfloor from 2-6pm? Or does beefing up in-stocks mean you only have 2 closers in SL on a Saturday night as opposed to 3 or 4 to help guests and drive sales? I guess that's what I'm trying to get at. Are we all too programmed to care about green metrics, and Out Of Stock scores, and RedCard goals - to remember that it really all ends and begins with the guest experience? Does the guest care if there are 34 Tide HE's on the shelf? They only need 2 so maybe it's OK that there are only 15 on the shelf?

Guest want product in stock. No need to ask a TM to have something pulled when it's already on the shelf. Yes having people on the floor to interact with them is important but our instocks team can do that, they are no worse at answering call boxes and answering questions than our sales floor team members.

We also still have respectful sized closing crews in softlines and hardlines. We just don't bring hardlines folks in until 1 pm or later outside of the TLs

You brought up the 34 bottles of Tide. Well our instocks team doesn't just push to capacity, they also make sure things are zoned and in the right place. Nothing pisses off a guest more than thinking they bought the 17 dollar bottle of tide detergent and getting charged 25 bucks because it was placed in the wrong spot.

As I have shared, since we made this change we have been consistently making sales despite lower traffic than q4 and our basket size is bigger then ever.

Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating for cuts to other departments. Hardlines needs hours too since they spend so much time backing up the lanes.

Just a big supporter of the instocks process.

 

[SFSFun]

First off, "more payroll" is not an answer to what I'm asking. We all know that in an environment with declining foot traffic and online sales growing - there aren't likely to be any significant changes to the payroll plans stores are seeing come down from HQ.

So, the question is what can we do at store level to fundamentally improve our ability to keep the floor full, zoned, and most importantly service the guest? I'm looking for things you've thought about but never could get anyone to listen or leadership was just content to go through the motions and didn't care.

Sorry to say, but a lot of it still does come down to payroll, if for nothing else than to distribute it better. Team members are not going to be motivated to work hard if they're only getting 10 hours per week. And they also aren't going to be very good at their job if they aren't doing it very often.

The store looks great, but does that drive sales more than say having 4 TM's on the salesfloor from 2-6pm? Or does beefing up in-stocks mean you only have 2 closers in SL on a Saturday night as opposed to 3 or 4 to help guests and drive sales? I guess that's what I'm trying to get at. Are we all too programmed to care about green metrics, and Out Of Stock scores, and RedCard goals - to remember that it really all ends and begins with the guest experience? Does the guest care if there are 34 Tide HE's on the shelf? They only need 2 so maybe it's OK that there are only 15 on the shelf?

The replenishment system currently reflects this. It's why we're not pulling cafs for every department 7 times a day. The system will let it sell down to a presentation minimum (all facings covered) and if it goes below or is predicted to go below (based on sales trends) it will come out in the morning autofill or the afternoon caf pull.

If your instocks team is focusing on filling half-full shelves, that is a problem and is not what they are supposed to be worried about. As long as the SFQ is correct, it doesn't need to be full to capacity all the time. The system can figure it out.

i think we need dedicated TMs for each area, they get 20 aisles and have to keep that area zoned and full.
So if Grocery is 40 aisles you need 2 TMs to keep it full and zoned all day long. No more mid day zone, it's and all day zone.
C is 40 aisles you need 2 TMs in that area.

This is basically what Walmart does. They have many department managers (earning $12-$15/hr depending on the departments) and they spend their days making sure their departments are full and profitable.

 

[instockout]

Guest want product in stock. No need to ask a TM to have something pulled when it's already on the shelf. Yes having people on the floor to interact with them is important but our instocks team can do that, they are no worse at answering call boxes and answering questions than our sales floor team members.

We also still have respectful sized closing crews in softlines and hardlines. We just don't bring hardlines folks in until 1 pm or later outside of the TLs

You brought up the 34 bottles of Tide. Well our instocks team doesn't just push to capacity, they also make sure things are zoned and in the right place. Nothing pisses off a guest more than thinking they bought the 17 dollar bottle of tide detergent and getting charged 25 bucks because it was placed in the wrong spot.

As I have shared, since we made this change we have been consistently making sales despite lower traffic than q4 and our basket size is bigger then ever.

Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating for cuts to other departments. Hardlines needs hours too since they spend so much time backing up the lanes.

Just a big supporter of the instocks process.

I genuinely wish more stores would understand how to run their instock process. I have begged my stl and even asked my DTL to go to other stores and set up the instock process the way we run it at my store. I went to one store, and their stl didn't like that I was dragging their instocks TM away from tasks that had nothing to do with instocks so I wasn't allowed to go back there.

 

[instockout]

This is basically what Walmart does. They have many department managers (earning $12-$15/hr depending on the departments) and they spend their days making sure their departments are full and profitable.

I honestly wouldn't be mad if target moved to some sort of department head. Not quite a tl but higher than a tm. Almost like a stepping stone. Where the person is in control of a few sections, research it, fill it, drop pogs for that area, drop fills for that area. Get involved in the pog process for that area. Getting tms more responsibilities over one area, with a slight increase in pay, maybe 11-11.50 could give certain tms the motivation to strive for greatness. Tell them it's a stepping stone for tl.

 

[jenna]

This is basically what Walmart does. They have many department managers (earning $12-$15/hr depending on the departments) and they spend their days making sure their departments are full and profitable.

Memories. Misty water-colored memories, of the way we were.

Ah, the great culling of the TLs.