Metro Cash: Bringing Best Global Practices

In the service-based industry, customer centricity is at the core of all daily operations. Therefore, METRO Cash and Carry India makes continuous efforts to ensure their customers are happy with their services and offerings. The business-to-business wholesale retailer recently launched METRO Blue Bulb campaign, which is an incentive-based initiative for the employees to innovate and better the processes to further enhance their customers’ shopping experience. “The initiative blends perfectly with our principle of global entrepreneurship for each employee to be personally invested in the company’s mission, and run it like their own,” a company spokesperson said.

At METRO India, all policies are formulated keeping employee’s interest as the central focus, and are modified and updated on a periodic basis. A recent example is their maternity policy which did not initially include adoption or surrogacy. However, based on a specific situation faced by the company, the policy has been taken up for revision. On the fun side, birthdays are declared holidays for the concerned employees so that they can spend time with their family and friends on their special day. “It has proved to be a great success among all employees,” the spokesperson said.

METRO India believes internal hiring is of great value as it results in considerable savings in time and training costs which is much higher when a new employee is on boarded. For instance, focus on internal hiring in the last three years has resulted in over a 50 per cent reduction in the hiring time and a 40 per cent reduction in the hiring cost for each new business unit thereby adding three additional months of sales.

Similarly, talent management initiatives of METRO Cash and Carry India have been successfully integrated into the campus programme to attract young talent. METRO India visits campuses of top business schools to hire fresh graduates and post graduates. These young hires then go through a rigorous 12-month curriculum of cross functional training across head office and METRO’s wholesale outlets, and are then placed across locations.

METRO Cash and Carry India believes their engagement score has significantly increased from 69 per cent to 83 per cent in the last four years. “The increase is a clear evidence of employees wanting to stay with the company. Attrition for the company has drastically dropped — from 54 per cent to 19.5 per cent against the industry standard of 50 per cent,” the spokesperson said.

The retailer is confident their want to grow within the company which is evident from the high retention which grew from a negligible 5 per cent to an impressive 80 per cent over four years.

ayushman@businessworld.in