To even insinuate that the raises Target gives out are "merit raises" is insane. The annual review process and raises are politcal at best. I had to give a team member a .02 cent raise a few years ago. Merit? Bullshit. I don't care if you give someone $30 and hour, the reality is there is a finite amount of work you can do in a time span. Can we be better and more efficient? Of course, Are all the changes based in reality? Of course not. This is not a sunshine and rainbows fix all solution. Morale starts at the top. A little information on whats happening and why would be very beneficial. Looking to a website to understand what is happening in your workplace speaks volumes as to how Spot thinks about their team...
Let me preface by saying that I left the company months ago and I wrote that post about five months ago, so I can’t really comment on what’s been happening since then. That said...
I’ve seen modernization work. I’ve seen modernization crash and burn. The whole E2E and modernized process only work when leaders are fully engaged along with their teams, clear expectations are set and followed up on, quality training is a priority, payroll is accurately divvied out to support the process, and HQ accurately funds payroll for store volume and traffic. The last one rarely happens. We all know that. Payroll is always an issue.
The most common thing I’ve seen among stores that are failing is that leadership has no clue what they’re supposed to be doing anymore. If a store is failing, I’ve found that’s it’s usually the entire district that’s a crap shoot. This is coming from being in multiple stores throughout multiple districts over the past few months and then talking to people back at my original stores. I honestly think that most store execs are doing the best they can with the communication and payroll they are getting.
My issue as an ETL and especially as HR was that no one from STL up could tell me how to make things work. No one could give me concrete advice on how to be successful anymore. There were all kinds of metrics to meet and of course sales should be increasing. I would get schedule requirements for modernized areas, but then not the payroll to fund those requirements so I would have to pull from other areas. My DTLs and business partners couldn’t give me any tangible insight into actually running the business anymore.
I know for sure that my old group director knows how to make modernization work. My old group is the one driving these changes and he ran several stores his own way (precursor to modernization). The problem I always found is that modernization best practices seem to change weekly and even daily, stores are told to do what works, and then punished for doing something different that works bc it is not whatever the newest direction was. And again, no district leader (in my experience) is any help other than parroting back what the newest buzzwords are.
Communication has always been an issue in stores and between the different business units in the company (DCs vs Stores vs HQ etc), but now I think teams are really seeing the effects of communication breakdowns between region leaders and group leaders and district leaders and store leaders. I really feel that stores are doing the best with the info they have, but the communication is getting lost on its way down to the stores. That’s how I felt anyway. All anyone knows anymore is that guest service is the most important thing (tasks be damned), that the A&A team should be doing everything themselves, and that the expectation is that you can’t miss an order or goal time ever. Besides that I don’t think most anyone below group level has any clue what we’re supposed to be doing anymore.
PS: and about pay...I hate the way Target does raises, but I think my main point back then is that promotions will always net you a way better raise than any annual review.
