The most effective form of communication for Macy's is written and direct. Every morning, the early managers update the board by the employee entrance with pertinent information such as: the MAGIC score, the credit and sales goal, the names of the managers who open and close and their extension numbers. Each morning, a manager also prints out approximately 60 copies of the 'Start Daily', which consists of detailed numerics about the previous day sales. Each day, the managers attend two meetings and they do a great job of communicating information from one meeting to the next. They also do a great job of keeping each manager updated. I rarely see a manager that is out of the loop.
Even when there can be improvements with Macy's, the company likes to take the negative and make it a positive. So, instead of focusing on the negative and saying "we need to work on this" or "we need to fix that", a manager will say "Our opportunity is..." That simple phrase makes a big difference. An opportunity for communication at Macy's is to create a new way for the employees to see the sales for the previous day. The Star Daily isn't effective at Macy's because some employees don't take the time to read the Star Daily. Also, some registers may accumulate a lot of star daily packets throughout the week which makes employees not bother to figure out which one they need to look at.
My mentor is on vacation for the next 10 days, so I plan to go above and beyond to bring success to the shoe department and I did just that today! As I probably mentioned in previous blogs, associates have to do an audit every morning in the shoe department. Unfortunately, the machines used for the audit weren't working for the past 5 days, which is NOT good. The machines were fixed yesterday, on Saturday, and today was the first day the audit was completed in almost a week and I took leadership in my area and delegated what to do and made sure the task was completed. I even grabbed another associate from another department and asked her to assist us and she did a fantastic job. I was supposed to leave work at 3, but I stayed until 5:30 so I could make sure the audit was 100% complete and that no shoes were missing. While also making sure the audit was being completed, I had to make sure that MAGIC (great customer service) and selling was occurring on the sales floor. The store manager and another manager recognized my leadership and thanked me for my work. Even though today was difficult and busy, it was the best day of my internship.
I can say that a new difficultly, as I take on more management roles, is approaching the other associates. Since I felt like a friend and sales associate in the beginning of my internship, it was a little hard crossing roles and asking the other associates to complete a task because they still saw me as just an intern. But that all changed today! If any associates in my department had a question, they came to me. They referred other customers to me. It was definitely a great feeling.
Note to Know: If you feel like you aren't being used to your full potential, or if your mentor isn't giving you enough to do, find something to do on your own and OWN it!
No comments:
Post a Comment