About The Midcounties Co-operative

Over the last three years colleague wellbeing has very much been at the heart of the Society’s People Strategy. They’ve introduced the Employee Assistance Programme Helpline which colleagues and their families can ring for free confidential advice. They’ve devised the colleague wellbeing guides and they’ve changed a number of their PSG policies to ensure they integrate wellbeing into everything they do. They have introduced a quarterly wellbeing newsletter with the idea that these are where possible linked to National Campaigns so as to raise the awareness of the subject. As an example the Spring 2013 Newsletter was around Mental Health. The Summer Newsletter was about Organ Transplants and giving blood. They believe that their approach to informing colleagues about key wellbeing subjects will allow them to understand the subject more.

In 2011 their colleagues elected Women’s Aid as their two year charity partner. Selecting a domestic violence charity was a brave and unusual choice for a retail business; indeed it was a first for Women’s Aid. As is usual, the partnership had a particular emphasis on raising funds. Soon into the partnership it became very clear that this was so much more than fundraising. This was an opportunity to help change behaviour and to raise awareness of the impact of domestic violence to their colleagues, members, customers and the wider community. It became about helping to break the cycle of two women dying each week as a result of domestic violence. When the partnership ended in February 2013 they had raised £345,000; given 22,741 hours of volunteering time (10,959 of these in the West Midlands area); changed their internal policies to recognise domestic violence and trained their HR team to support colleagues in need; supported a national Women’s Aid campaign collecting 24,000 signatures helping Women’s Aid to surpass their 2011 target of 10,000 signatures and created an educational toolkit for Women’s Aid to use nationally in schools to break the cycle of abuse before it happens. Their work has helped Women’s Aid to raise their profile nationally and their partnership has been recognised through the achievement of national awards.

At The Midcounties Co-operative, openness is one of their key values. They try to be transparent with each colleague about what benefits there are to being employed by Midcounties. One way they can see this is by logging onto their colleague portal and viewing their Total Reward Statement (TRS). Their TRS shows all their benefits over the year including salary, uniform, health benefits, service awards, training, discount savings and more. TRS were launched in 2013 and was supported by a huge communication campaign and is backed up by ongoing poster campaigns at sites. They’ve chosen Savvy Sam as the face of Your Benefits and created a brand to have consistency in their communications to colleagues. Sam is a friendly reminder of what is available to colleagues and where to find their benefits. Sam’s website has been set up for each colleague to provide a place where they can get discounts with external businesses online, read about Society news, see what events are coming up, hear about new benefit schemes, enter monthly competitions and chat to other colleagues across all of the businesses on the forum.