EMPLOYEES CAN'T GET NO SATISFACTION: SURVEY

DAVID GHITELMAN

ST. LOUIS -- Nearly all supermarket companies fail to include measurements of either customer or employee satisfaction in their bonus/incentive plans for store management personnel, and so are missing a key opportunity for building shopping and worker loyalty.

That's the conclusion reached by Fred Martels, managing partner, People Solution Strategies, St. Louis, which conducted the recently released Supermarket Store Management 2001 Compensation and Benefits Survey for the National Grocers Association, Arlington, Va.

Among what he called the "alarming findings" of the survey, Martels noted that 95% of the companies he surveyed do not include criteria for measuring customer or employee satisfaction in their incentive/bonus plan for store-level managers.

"Employees will make important what is measured," Martels told SN, talking about consumer satisfaction. "If customer service is never measured or monitored, there will be less importance placed on it, and management will never know how well the organization is doing. What's more, you have to link measures to awards and recognition."

Employee satisfaction, he added, usually results in better service. "Stores that have higher consumer loyalty tend to have employees who love their jobs. You can measure this through formal surveys, and you can also measure it through exit interviews and by tracking employee turnover."

However, as Martels noted in another of his "alarming findings," more than 50% of companies surveyed do not calculate employee turnover at all and 30% calculate it only occasionally.