Tesco has today announced a number of major changes to its stores, including management roles and changes affecting other staff members.
In a statement, Tesco said:
“Today, we’re announcing some proposed changes to our business to ensure we remain focused and competitive in a fast-changing market.
“We continually review the way we operate to make sure we are meeting customers’ needs and supporting colleagues in a sustainable way. This means doing more of what works and stopping or simplifying where we need to, so that we’re running our business as efficiently as possible.
“This also means making some difficult but necessary decisions but will ensure we can continue to invest in the things that matter most for our customers and business.”
These proposed changes include:
Management changes
Over the last couple of years, we have started rolling out a new management structure in approximately 350 of our smaller Superstores, which better reflects the needs of our stores.
We have now taken the decision to extend this structure across all our larger Superstores and Extra stores.
We will introduce approximately 1,800 new Shift Leader roles in these stores, leading on the day-to-day operational duties on the shop floor.
We will also realign our manager roles to ensure they are all of equal size and complexity, focusing on overall store performance and supporting our colleagues to serve their customers, communities and planet a little better every day.
With the introduction of these new Shift Leader roles and realignment of management roles, we have taken the difficult decision to reduce the number of Lead and Team Managers in our large stores, impacting around 1,750 colleagues.
We are supporting colleagues impacted by these changes, who will have the option of moving into Shift Leader vacancies with financial support or taking redundancy.
Counter closures
We first announced changes to our counters back in 2019, and we’ve been reviewing them on an ongoing basis ever since.
We have seen a significant decrease in demand for our counters over the last few years, and our customers no longer say they are a significant reason for them to come in store and shop with us. Instead, they are choosing to buy from our wide range of great quality products available in our aisles.
The majority of our stores no longer operate any counters. In the small number of stores that do still have them, many are only open with reduced days and times – and we have strengthened our in-aisle ranges to ensure that customers can still find the meat, fish and deli products they want.
We have therefore decided to close our remaining counters and hot delis from 26 February, and the space will be repurposed to better reflect our customers’ needs. All affected colleagues will be offered alternatives roles in store.
Where we can work with a third party to offer a counter experience in-store, we will continue to do so.
In addition to the changes above, there are a small number of other localised changes across our business that we are talking to colleagues about. In our stores, this will include the closure of eight pharmacies, where there are other pharmacies within one mile of our store, moving overnight roles to the daytime in 12 stores and reducing hours within some Post Offices. We are also removing a small number of roles in different functions of Head Office and closing the Tesco Maintenance National Operating Centre (NOC) in Milton Keynes.
Taking into account all the localised changes, we expect this to impact around 350 roles across the business. Our priority is to support colleagues impacted by these changes and we will enter a consultation process with USDAW on these proposals.
We currently have around 2,000 vacancies across our business, in addition to the more than 1,800 new Shift Leader roles we will be introducing to stores.
Tesco UK and ROI CEO, Jason Tarry said: “These are difficult decisions to make, but they are necessary to ensure we remain focused on delivering value for our customers wherever we can, as well as ensuring our store offer reflects what our customers value the most. Our priority is to support those colleagues impacted and help find alternative roles within our business from the vacancies and newly created roles we have available.”
