Operating Review

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Colleagues: a great place to work

The majority of our store colleagues live within the communities served by their store and many donate time and effort to a broad range of good causes outside work. Our Local Heroes programme is our own awards scheme, which recognises and encourages colleagues in stores, depots and offices who do this and we match all funds raised with awards of between £200 and £500. The scheme is now in its sixth year during which time we have donated around £750,000 to good causes. This year we donated around £250,000, an increase of 48 per cent over the previous year.

Our colleagues are vital to our success and over the past year we completed the delivery of leadership training to 9,000 managers throughout our business. We track how engaged colleagues are with our goals and values through our ‘talkback’ survey and last year saw marked improvements in both colleague engagement and our leadership skills.

The Tell Justin initiative has lead to 17,000 suggestions since it was launched

The Tell Justin suggestion scheme was launched in September 2004. Nearly 17,000 ideas have been received since that time and ten per cent of suggestions are actioned.

This year we will pay our highest ever bonus to colleagues with 118,000 sharing £56 million in bonus payments in June 2007. Including this bonus, we will have paid £145 million in bonus scheme payments over the last three years. A just reward for the huge efforts of our colleagues.