How is sears to work for

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Our Sales Floor Associates make holiday wishes come true by connecting our members with the perfect gifts for everyone on their holiday shopping list! They asked the focus groups why they shopped at Sears, what they wanted, what they expected, what they disliked. Much of it was hollow, however, and it often seemed that no one at headquarters had been listening to customers. Merchandise was out of stock, sales associates were hard to find, returns were time consuming, service was bad.

The big surprise was that, in spite of it all, people basically liked Sears. The employee task force conducted 26 employee focus groups and studied all the data on employee attitudes and behavior, including a question opinion survey given to every employee every other year. They were proud to be at Sears. While the task forces were busy gathering data, we set up an additional group to produce a vision and values statement.

It had predictable difficulties. After talking to 80, employees, the group came up with a set of values that sounded like the Boy Scout oath. All fine ambitions, but what did they have to do with retailing? Then it struck us that we had been staring at it all along. And if we could achieve both of those goals, Sears would certainly become a compelling place to invest. No one would have to carry around a little printed card to remember what Sears was all about. Times of crisis like the ones Sears had gone through make corporate transformation necessary and, ironically, somewhat easier.

People know that change is required because they can easily remember when pieces of the sky were raining on their heads. But change to what? Change managed how, especially in a large organization? And change perpetuated how, as a dynamic process rather than as a onetime event? Times of crisis make corporate change necessary, but change to what, and change managed how? The task forces had spent months listening to customers and employees, studying best practices at other companies, thinking about what would constitute world-class performance at Sears, and establishing measures and objectives.

As a result, they had at least a partial answer to the first question: Change to what? The customer task force had established four goals: to build customer loyalty, to make Sears a fun place to shop, to provide excellent customer service by hiring and holding on to the best employees, and to offer the right merchandise at the right prices. The employee task force came up with three: to build a workforce of involved and empowered employees, to encourage new ideas, and to create an environment in which employees could realize their personal goals and develop their skills and abilities.

The financial task force had four goals: to increase operating margins, to improve asset management, to raise productivity, and to grow revenues. While the separate task forces were formulating those objectives, the Phoenix Team as a whole was beginning to think in terms of a business model that would link employees, customers, and investors into a single logical entity.

This simple algorithm looked more like a slogan than an operational strategy, but there was more to it than met the eye. The right merchandise at the right prices would get us nowhere if our employees were poorly motivated. Second, it was a formula made up of leading, not lagging, indicators. It is now a truism that financial results are a rearview mirror, that they tell you only how you did in the last quarter and not how you will do in the next.

The objectives formulated by the task forces gave us a set of preliminary measures, on which the task forces had already begun to gather data. But we wanted to go well beyond the usual balanced scorecard, commonly just a set of untested assumptions, and nail down the drivers of future financial performance with statistical rigor. We wanted a set of nonfinancial measures that would be every bit as rigorous and auditable as financial ones.

To make that happen, we had to take this first version of the employee-customer-profit model and elaborate and refine it until we had tested and proved the measures it was built on. The Initial Model: From Objectives to Measures The first step in creating an employee-customer-profit model was to devise a set of measures based on our objectives in our three categories: a compelling place to work, to shop, and to invest.

It was a task that struck many people as utopian, but even the skeptics understood that dependable information about causation would be invaluable if we could get it.

Would customers notice? Would the investment lead to increased customer retention, better word of mouth, higher revenues, greater market share? If so, how long would it take?

Or, even more to the point, suppose that we wanted to measure the effects of an improvement in management skills.

The model and the TPI could tell us how important those management skills actually were, measured in terms of employee attitudes and customer satisfaction. We wanted a chain of causation that would answer all those questions and more—a working model of the employee-customer-profit chain that would help us run the company. For customers and employees, some of the metrics were brand-new.

Personal growth and development was not something Sears had ever measured before, and neither was customer retention. We had to invent the measures and the new measurement techniques that went with them. Once we had defined our new measures, we spent the first two quarters of gathering metrics of every kind, old and new; in the third quarter, we gave our huge collection of survey and financial data to a firm of econometric statisticians for analysis.

The methodology they use is called causal pathway modeling —as distinct from regression analysis, which examines data and observes correlations without establishing causation. The experts took our two quarters of data from different stores, compared the results across time and place, and, using statistical techniques like cluster and factor analysis, found linkages and impacts in the data. A month later, they gave us their report, having found some strong and some weak connections, and some connections we had never expected or imagined.

We made the appropriate adjustments in our model and went on collecting data for a new iteration at the end of the next quarter. It was exciting stuff. We could see how employee attitudes drove not just customer service but also employee turnover and the likelihood that employees would recommend Sears and its merchandise to friends, family, and customers. We were also able to establish fairly precise statistical relationships. We began to see exactly how a change in training or business literacy affected revenues.

We also found that two dimensions of employee satisfaction—attitude toward the job and toward the company—had a greater effect on employee loyalty and behavior toward customers than all the other dimensions put together. We still use the question employee survey to gather information about working conditions, satisfaction with pay and benefits, and so forth; but for econometric purposes, a mere 10 of those 70 questions captured the predictive relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

Moreover, those 10 questions amounted to a report card on management, which reemphasized the importance of management skills in achieving company goals. A Compelling Place to Work We discovered that responses to these 10 questions on our question employee survey had a higher impact on employee behavior and, therefore, on customer satisfaction than the measures we devised initially: personal growth and development and empowered teams. Conversely, the statisticians could find no direct causal pathway from two of the measures we had put into our tentative model— personal growth and development and empowered teams —to any of our customer data.

We believe that growth, empowerment, and teamwork matter, but clearly something about the way we measured them was flawed. However important they might be, the measures we had did not lie on a predictive pathway from employee attitudes to customer satisfaction to shareholder value.

So in the next version of our employee-customer-profit model, we replaced those initial measures with the 10 questions about the job and the company. In the 18 months from mid to the end of , we produced a model, refined it three times, and created a TPI for the company as a whole, but the process of improvement continues. We conduct interviews and collect data continually, assemble our information quarterly, and recalculate the impacts in our model once a year to stay abreast of the changing economy, changing demographics, and changing competitive circumstances.

The TPI is not a perfect system and never will be, despite our steady improvements. The point is that we know vastly more than we once did, that all that information helps us run the company, and that some of it has given us a decided competitive edge.

Take the example about the quality of management as a driver of employee attitudes. Our model shows that a 5 point improvement in employee attitudes will drive a 1. These numbers are as rigorous as any others we work with at Sears. Every year, our accounting firm audits them as closely as it audits our financials.

The rectangles represent survey information, the ovals, hard data. The measurements in gray are those we collect and distribute in the form of the Sears Total Performance Indicators. By mid, as we began making the TPI operational, we had invested nearly two years in the transformation of senior management, a group of to people.

We now had to build the same kind of ownership and engagement in the entire Sears workforce—a group of , people—in a much shorter period of time. As we mentioned earlier, deploying the employee-customer-profit chain and the TPI throughout the company was more than a question of communication. In fact, only a few years earlier, the communication challenge had been the reverse. Now that the financial turnaround had succeeded, what sales associates needed to be told was not just that the customer mattered but that they mattered, too—that the company could not survive without their active help and participation.

We needed to take our statistical model in all its intellectual purity and bring it down to earth. To begin with, employees misunderstood what was expected of them, and that was a real barrier to effective change.

In the first place, it is not an answer people would give you if you woke them out of a sound sleep at in the morning. Someone had taught them that line.

In the second place, it is the wrong answer. Sears is a retailer, not Fort Knox. Misunderstanding is also a barrier to trust. The real answer was 2 cents.

How could we expect people to react well to a variety of necessary changes if they thought the company was rolling in wealth? Learning maps were not original with Sears—they were developed by a company called Root Learning of Perrysburg, Ohio—but combining them with town hall meetings was our own idea.

The combination seemed ideally suited to our needs. Learning maps are easy to use and require no prior training or special skills, yet they draw people into the content, make substantial demands on their analytical reasoning, raise their economic literacy, and increase their understanding of how the company works. Town hall meetings expand that learning and convert it into action. A learning map is a large picture of a town or a store or, in one instance, a river that leads small groups of participants through a business or historical process.

The learning map that appears in this article was designed to walk people through the changing demographics, economics, and competitive circumstances of the retail trade. Moreover, the maps demonstrate that we trust employees to reach their own sound conclusions. All this place cares about is making money if you win anything they make you pay for it. The managers always try to touch you.

Cons Half hour breaks, not paid enough. Management had no problem giving someone a hour work week comprised of two 4-hour days and a hour day but other than that it was an easy work environment, management were friendly, and the work was rather mindless.

Pros down to earth management. Cons unable to work there full-time. Stay away unless you have no family life or want to put up with stressful days. After "training" you are pretty much on your own.

You know what time you will need to leave your house but never know when you will be back. Pros None. Cons Long hours, poor pay. Pretty much on your own. You go to work still feeling burdened by what you could not occomplish yesterday. There never enough time in a 8 hrs shift to get the work done. But my store was a really good place to work. Good leadership and a positive environment at all times.

Overall a success career at Sears. Unfortunately every store I work at closed. Enjoy training developing Comission sales people. Alot of my csa became million dollar writer for other companies. Pros Metrics were updated everyday so you know where youbstood.

Cons Micromanaged. Management was never there and was super unprofessional, made me feel like quitting almost all the time. Nice place to get your first job, they train you on a lot of things. Pros Hour lunches 20 minute breaks. Cons The credit cards and stuff. Good place to work no Pto. Great environment cool people. You learn a lot on the job. Plenty of free time cool supervisors and managers.

Over all cool. Pros Free time. It was a job like any other job. Not much to survive on A job like any other job. Pros It was ok.

Cons Not sure. Once the company started to crash the push to get customers to apply for credit cards became laughable. They wanted us to push a 2nd or 3rd store card to people who rarely patronized the business, setting unreachable goals and then taking hours away from people who couldn't reach them. Pros Employee Discounts.

Cons Non-livable Wage. Claimed Profile. Want to know more about working here? Ask a question about working or interviewing at Sears Holdings Corporation. Our community is ready to answer.