Colleagues - "those who work in our Group"

Overview

The quality of any business depends strongly on its people. To develop a good team it is essential to recruit the right people, keep them motivated and create the right environment for them to perform well. There are many contributors to attracting, motivating and retaining good employees such as financial reward, geographical location and offering interesting and empowering opportunities. Often what people do for a living is bound up in their personal identities; generally people want to feel good about the work they do and make a positive contribution to society and the environment. In a competitive environment for people, this kind of positive experience can make an important difference to business performance.

In this context, our CR strategy and operations are pivotal to developing a positive image of Home Retail in order to recruit and retain a strong and motivated work force.

We see the importance of CR to our employees in their response to our community programmes which show our staff embracing the challenge of fund raising each year to improve upon their previous fundraising totals (for example, raising £1.2 million last year for our charitable partners). We see the evidence in our distribution centre staff voluntarily taking on the challenge of accrediting our warehouses to the International Standard Organisation’s environmental management system 14001.

This way of working is bound up in Home Retail’s culture and is reflected in the values of both Argos and Homebase.

We see the main role of ‘values’ as helping shape employee behaviours while they are at work. Our values link explicitly to two of our seven corporate responsibilities:

• Serving customers to their complete satisfaction
• Providing a working environment that is conducive to the recruitment and retention of the widest possible range of talented staff

And indirectly support three others:

• Providing a safe and healthy place of work (‘respect and support each other’ reinforces our anti-bullying stance).
• Developing strong community relationships in support of business objectives (‘taking ownership and making things happen’ / ‘making a difference’. Our community programme allows staff to really make a difference – for example by connecting with their local hospice, or by taking the lead in a fundraising challenge).
• Providing products of the appropriate quality, including responsible product sourcing and retailing, product safety and reliability (again, through putting the customer’s needs first and by ‘making it easy’ – easy for customers to do the right thing by buying ‘’WaterWise’’ products, or by recycling their catalogue).

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