Driving business growth through employee engagement at a leading food retailer

50% greater employee engagement levels

15% increase in sales

£82m additional revenue

The Challenge

Our research shows that 82% of supermarkets with effective employee engagement meet their labour turnover targets, which positively impacts customer experience and boosts growth.

As new low-cost entrants disrupted the sector, we worked with an established supermarket chain to embed an employee engagement programme that enabled it to deliver a service that encouraged customer loyalty and underpinned growth.

Our Approach

We began by conducting detailed leadership interviews, management workshops and employee focus groups. We used our findings to develop an engagement model that incorporated three key elements:

How engaged employees are with the company as an employer.
How engaged employees are with customers.
How engaged employees are with the company’s business strategy.

Over five years we introduced our model across all its stores. This included identifying the specific drivers of engagement for each individual store and creating tailored action plans. We also identified, codified and shared internal best practice for store manager behaviours to improve colleague engagement.

The Results

Our work has improved the key drivers of engagement in 75% of stores and engagement levels have improved across the organisation by 50% on a store-by-store basis.

This resulted in the overall growth of the business. By integrating employee engagement data, store-labour employee turnover metrics, customer satisfaction levels and mystery shopper measures with year-on-year revenue and profitability metrics, the benefits of greater engagement became clear.

We found that around 15% of sales growth and 10% of talent retention were driven by engagement, which accounts for £82m in additional year-on-year revenue.