General Managers' Report 5/22/08

We are please to announce that the Produce Department now has an assistant Department Manager. Chris Grigsby, who has brought a tremendous amount of skill and a wonderful aesthetic eye to the department has recently been promoted to this position.

The Floor Managers have expressed interest in having regular "touch base" meetings; we are going to try to start meeting on a monthly basis to brainstorm, make sure we are all on the same page about our roles and responsibilities, and delve into the supervisory training that the Department Managers have been digging into. Those in attendance at last month's meeting also noted how much they appreciated just being able to be in a room together and that the meeting fostered an environment of support that was encouraging. On a related note, our IT Specialist, Zafra, is currently training as a Floor Manager.

We continue to plug away at the training with the Department Managers. Topics that we've covered with them since our last meeting include setting standards of accountability and following through, developing staff leadership skills, and evaluating staff performance. We have only two sessions left, which is a good thing now that summer is starting to kick in; topics to be covered include departmental goal setting, tracking department financials, and Co-op 201 (integrating Co-op principles into daily operations.) It's been a long row to hoe for all of us, facilitators and participants alike, but we are pleased with the DM's willingness to participate and the genuine focused attention that they have brought to the training.

When we attack the training on goal setting for departments, we are also hoping to get started on putting together our business plan for 2009. We have an ambitious goal of being able to extend the goal setting process to include 3 and 5 year goals as well, both for the store as a whole and departmentally speaking. We'll try to pull together a Board survey similar to the survey that we did last year for the next meeting; put your thinking caps on, please.

We recently underwent an inspection by the Dept. of Ag. as part of our application process to become vendors at the Farmers' Market. We passed with flying colors. Come and see us at the Market this Friday, May 23^rd. We'll be there once a month when the Market comes to upper Main St. for the street festival.

The deli counter has been successfully bumped out, the new coffee makers and grinders installed, and the expanded space is glorious to work in. Some sort of miscommunication with the electrician happened, as they came to wire for additional outlets and were not aware that they would be expected to complete the project that evening; they boogied before the new outlets were able to be installed. The plumbing portion of the remodel has been successfully completed, save for the installation of a new water filter that is on order.

We had a very long day on May 7^th, holding both a morning and evening All-Staff meeting. Attendance at these meetings is no longer mandatory, and we had about a 50% turnout. We are pleased with the turnout, overall. Agenda topics included a 6-month financial report, a brainstorming session on improving efficiency that went over like a lead balloon, a construction update, ideas for summer stress busting, and the presentation of a pay-for performance compensation system. We are including for your information the copy of the proposal that we presented to the staff. As we expected, the new compensation philosophy met with some suspicion and fear. The GMT remains confident, however, that this compensation philosophy will allow us to meet our other goal of being able to implement a livable wage for all staff members within the next two years. We are also putting together a committee of staff members to help develop the proposal further, do any more necessary research, and to help facilitate its implementation.