Holiday Helpers

Good morning... What can I get for you?

As promised, we're having a story about Holiday Helpers... To bring you all up to speed. Way back in the old days... before me even... there was always a tradition of having corporate partners go out to the stores to help with stocking and coffee tasting. With holidays being the largest part of the sales year, this tradition connected corporate and the field... and the stores got some relief as well as facilitated some relationship building. Tradition...

So carry forward to 2000... when I arrived at the SSC, I inherited this program from Retail Learning. From my understanding, the holiday before I got there the "program" was limping a bit... There was a list posted in the commons for folks to sign up for the various shifts at the various stores in the Seattle area... The list was then sent out... There were "no-shows" and lates... just like store partners... except SSC partners have a tendency to think that "no-showing" or being late is just no big deal...

I had the pleasure of owning the program for 3+ years (+ equals the transition year)... There were many enhancements:

• A database registration process
• Training from real store managers
• A minimal level of executive sponsorship
• Product support from food and marketing
• A real condiment bar from Store Development
• Mail Merge to send the stores their Helper assignments
• Post-Holiday Helper participant survey
• An executive report on participation, no shows and demographics

This is what happens when you let training folks run amok with a program like Holiday Helpers... It tends to get admin'd to death... I've learned some things about Holiday Helpers over the years that I think I should share.

• There will always be "no shows" and lates
• Some stores will always "didn't get the e-mail"
• Whatever training is provided, most SSC partners will only be able to clean the lobby and do product sampling... some will be able to stock product
• There is such a thing as admining the intent out of a program
• With Executive Sponsorship comes much misinterpretation

So, let me share one last story for you around Holiday Helpers... I know some of you SSC partners need to complete the online training for Holiday Helpers so I'll make this short. In my last year as the Holiday Helper, I spent a fair amount of effort letting folks know that there was a cutoff for signing up... so we could give the stores plenty of notice of who was coming. I had Jim Alling give some announcements and a reminder that the sign up cutoff was coming up. We even planned a 2 day extension for stragglers... 2 days after all of the e-mails were sent and folks were getting ready for their shifts... Jim Donald gives me a call to schedule a shift in a downtown Seattle store. No problem... It was the 1 "no-show" (because of a mix up on his calendar) and 2 re-schedulings that were a bit annoying...

So there you go... More than you wanted to know about Holiday Helpers... Now go back and read the first real paragraph to see what the program was really about.

We'll see you tomorrow for your usual...

Pat Nerr...