We come to our most important asset; our employees. They are the people who are ready to serve our customers. It is they who leave their homes each morning for the cold rainy days or the extreme heat of the spring gardening season. It is they who must ready themselves to keep that magic of green garden gates with every customer. They are our lifeblood.
We talked about the qualities of our manager in entries #67 through #72. These qualities hold true for all of our employees. As we discuss these employees in the next entries we will talk further about the characteristics that make them so important to us.
First, what do we call our employees? In the old days, they were just “employees”, nothing more, nothing less. Then they were called “salespeople”, which in our view had the connotation that we viewed them important on if they would “sell” the customer something. Now, a new buzzword has appeared; “sales associate". I guess now they are not only standing there to sell you something, they are some sort of “partner” in the operation. We think that is a phony term, pretentious and contrived. In most garden stores, they are certainly not partners in anything to do with the store.
We, at green garden gates, are going to go way out in a new direction with an identifier for our employees. We believe that our stores are an adventure in gardening. It is a unique place to not only enjoy plants, but also an opportunity to place those plants in the personal private space of the home. We want our customers to first enjoy our surroundings and we hope that will translate into our plants in their life.
Our employees will be called garden guides or “guides”. They are charged with introducing, educating and directing our customers to our plants and plant care products. They don’t "sell" as their only mission. They guide the gardener and sell the plants only if the gardener feels that those plants will add value to their lives.
We know that we are splitting hairs. We know that they must sell for our business to survive. But we believe that if the approach is right from the very start, from the first glance at an employee’s name badge, the sales will happen and happen at an even faster pace with this concept.
How are the employees organized by responsibility in the company?
In order to decide the numbers and qualifications of each employee we need for our store, we must set out a framework of organization. We will talk later about specific responsibilities of each category of employee.
1. The Store Manager
He or she is responsible for the overall operation of the store. The store manager reports directly to the four principal owners as the board of directors, of green garden gates. The floor manager reports to the store manager
2. The Floor Manager
He or she is responsible for all the operations on the retail floor. The floor manager is the assistant to the store manager and reports to he or she. The section leaders report to the floor manager.
3. Section Leaders
There are seven departments or “sections” in our stores;
Cashier Section
Carryout/Support Section
Garden Buildings Section
Bedding Plants Section
Nursery/Perennials Section
Receiving and Processing Section
Bulk Products Section
They each have defined geographic boundaries, supervise assigned employees, and manage particular plants and products inventory. They are in essence separate little businesses within our larger store. The section leaders report to the floor manager. The employees of that section report to the section leader.
4. Garden Guides
The guides report to the section leader of their assigned primary work area.
Now this all sounds pretty rigid and militaristic. In reality, it is far from that. We do this for common procedural protocol to solve and expedite regular operational questions of our staff. For example, if an employee needs time off, he or she knows who to approach with the problem in order to get the answer quickly.
We are absolutely committed to a complete open door transparency up and down the responsibility chain. No person is turned away or chastised for seeking advice, offering comments or making a request of any other person in the company no matter what the conversation may be or another employee's position in our company. This structure just gives us some order in the routine needs of employees during the season.
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Which group of employees do we need to listen to, need to empower, the most?
"What sets Nordstrom apart is that, from department manager to chairman, all tiers of the inverted pyramid work to support the sales staff, not the other way around. “The only thing we have going for us is the way we take care of our customers and the people who take care of our customers are on the floor”.
Explaining the Inverted Pyramid of the Nordstrom Company
“The
By Robert Spector
“The guy who started on the job yesterday has just as much authority as a ten year veteran to walk up to a customer and say “We are not happy with the car wash. We want to give you a re-wash. Would you mind going through again?”
The President of Mikes’Car
“The
By Robert Spector
“We were having trouble with the cash registers all that busy May week. On Saturday, they started to go nuts again and the lines were forming. The person responsible has flown off for three days to play golf with the owner. She left us hanging with no backup and no one to call for help. If I was the owner and I knew that she had chosen golf over my store, I would have fired her right on the spot”
Garden store checkout employee
We are believers in Nordstrom’s Inverted Pyramid of Empowerment. Our employees, our garden guides are the group we need to pay the most attention; listen to what they are observing, react to their needs and execute our plans with them in mind. Our customers are, of course, the most empowered people in our business. The top of the pyramid are the garden guides. It is the job of the rest of the people in our organization to help our garden guides in every way possible. If our guides are not successful the company will fail.
