Customer service experiences are a very hot topic, especially online and in social media. People regularly share the good and the bad, and social media has become the new word-of-mouth. It’s where people hear from friends, family and acquaintances how they “rate” the businesses they frequent. The Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods has upped the ante on how customer service for groceries is going [...]
Friendly City Food Co-op Harrisonburg, VA Year founded: 2011 Membership investment: $200 Number of members: 1,800 Number of employees: 34 Retail square feet: 5,600 When Friendly City Food Co-op in Harrisonburg, Va. opened as a startup in 2011, they quickly gained a positive reputation in the community for providing great customer service. As Mary Beth Kannen, the co-op’s front-end team leader said, “The name [...]
When boards and management make decisions with the long game of co-op impact in mind, a powerful relationship with owners can develop. Strategic decision-making can be an opportunity to build a strong, participatory co-op culture that understands that the leadership is obliged, by virtue of its fiduciary responsibility, to make decisions to benefit the co-op and accordingly, its owners. Owners typically have high expectations [...]
Cooperative boards of directors are small groups of people who influence the future of the world. They are committed citizens who think and learn and work together for something that together they find relevant and compelling. Directors are practically the direct descendants of the Rochdale Pioneers. Like their “ancestors,” the goal of cooperative boards is to make their utopian way of thinking about the [...]
Systems & Structures within a cooperative are essential to creating and maintaining strong communication between co-op stakeholder groups. Rebecca Torpie shares some brief points about how these systems can better be leveraged to create and sustain meaningful engagement at your co-op.
There’s commonly a remarkable diversity among how the members of a co-op’s board of directors and how co-op staff see and understand the co-op. And the perception of the myriad owner members are as distinct and individual as the members themselves. And yet each group is holding a unique piece of wisdom about the cooperative. This field guide offers boards tools and resources to [...]
Workplace employee engagement is a hot topic. Open any human resources publication and you’ll find countless articles on making work fun, motivational and results-oriented. No matter what the individual strategies are to achieve that, the connection people feel to the business values and whether they feel aligned with them is a big part of fostering engagement in the workplace. While some workplaces may struggle [...]
Key Insights The major takeaways from interviews with three co-ops on their initiatives to improve diversity in hiring and increase cultural awareness on their staff teams are make staff diversity and cultural awareness a priority to your team (and budget) create goals and make the measurables visible to your team aim to be reflective of your community use community engagement as a hiring tool [...]
Key Insights Round up is an extremely successful, simple way of collecting donations for partner organizations. Making the ask mandatory is the best way to ensure cashier compliance and consistency. Incentivizing cashiers and making goal achievement fun and rewarding can make a difference in buy-in and outcomes. Co-ops may want to try every other month or quarterly round ups to test shopper and cashier [...]
The roll out right before Thanksgiving turned out better than expected. Having a single centralized spot where everyone could see what was happening in real time was an incredible improvement to the status quo experience of phone tag or tracking people down during the holiday order rush. You could simply post a message and almost instantly see somebody respond to the issue. The staff [...]
