Lorna Bryson

DeeDee Doke spoke with the head of resourcing for Tesco

Lorna Bryson looks forward to the Christmas holiday season with more than just a bit of professional anticipation. For Bryson, who holds the lofty role of head of resource/diversity UK and Republic of Ireland for Tesco, much of the work year is spent in an office. But the holidays give her the gift of two weeks’ working in the shop floor environment she loves.

“At Christmas,” she explains enthusiastically, “everyone from the board right down goes into the stores, and we work on the tills and fill the shelves. I’m in my element. I love it.”

Bryson is proud of her career start on the ground floor of the shop floor, which was launched through a government Youth Training Scheme when she left school at 16. “I was determined to leave school and my parents said that I could leave school as long as I got a full-time job. I didn’t have lots of qualifications, but I wanted to leave school, so I got a job at Tesco,” she recalls.

“In fact,” she continues, “my mother made me go for the interview at Tesco in my local town, and I joined then. I earned £21.50 a week for 39 hours, but I loved it. I absolutely got the retail bug very quickly.”

Bryson’s philosophy
I’ve got to make sure that the work I do is right, and if I don’t experience it — if I don’t go and see the graduate campaign in the stores or that this is the new job role we have created, then I wouldn’t be doing it right or well

Today, Bryson’s intimate knowledge of what actually goes on in a Tesco store and her unmatched understanding of customers and staff needs guide her in developing and implementing the retailer’s resourcing strategy for retail and distribution operations in the UK and Ireland.

Tesco has served up one of the few consistent ‘good news’ stories to emerge in the UK’s current struggle with the economy; even the tumultuous recession has not been able to hold back either expansion or recruitment at the monolithic retailer. “Recruitment is ongoing at Tesco this year,” Bryson confirmed to Recruiter. “Probably this year alone, we will have recruited over 12,000 people. Now that’s with new stores and new space that we open”, she says, as well as to fill roles left vacant by natural attrition.

However, she adds, fewer people have left the company, resulting in fewer replacements to make. “Labour turnover is at its lowest than we’ve seen in a long, long time,” Bryson says. “People feel secure in their jobs and want to stay where they are rather than testing new waters, I suppose. Labour turnover has always been very low with Tesco, but it is exceptionally low now.”

Secret of my success
At the end of the day, I am a shop keeper. I’ve been on that shop floor, I’ve sat on a till for eight hours, I’ve been on the night shift behind the deli counter, and I understand what the customers want and what our staff want

That said, Tesco still needs additional staff in the run-up to the holidays, and the retailer made the news this autumn when it announced it would seek to recruit the jobless family and friends of its own employees for seasonal roles in the two peak Christmas shopping weeks. “The directors said they were really keen to look after their employees at Christmas time,” Bryson says. “We took the ‘friends and family’ ethos, and completed a whole lot of research around unemployment. It turned out that one in six Tesco employees had a friend or a member of the family that had been made redundant or unemployed in the last 12 months.”

Any family and friends referred still faced the same application and interview procedures as any other candidate, Bryson says, “but we decided to do it internally before going externally, and the uptake has been very promising”.

During Bryson’s own 27-year career with Tesco to date, she has moved house six times and spent a number of years as a store manager in various locations. “I was, I think, the sixth female store manager in the company - back then, that was a big thing,” she says. She first managed existing stores in Aviemore and Glasgow city centre before she passed a dreamed-of milestone, opening a brand-new store. This particular store was located in Lanark. “I always wanted a [new] store that was mine because you set the agenda and you don’t pick up old baggage,” she explains.

Five years ago, she took her first step into a formalised human resources role, becoming what Tesco calls “a format personnel manager”, looking after 253 stores across the UK and 53,000 employees. The new job not only expanded her responsibilities but her vision of the business. “It allowed me to see the whole size of the business; when you are in your own shop as a store manager, you are in charge of your own destiny and your people are as motivated as you and hungry to do a good job,” Bryson says. “When you move into a role where you really have to influence people on development, on coaching and on recruitment, it is a huge step change.”

A little more than two years later, she took on her current role where the challenge is to not only to bring on great people, but to ensure that the stores’ workforces are “mirror images” of their communities. To that end, Bryson, who leads an 11-person team, has just overseen the creation of a programme to recruit school leavers, which enjoys a link-up with the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award programme to help youths between 14 and 24 years gain necessary skills.

“We designed a programme that will absolutely fit with the stores, an 18-month programme where a young person can join us at 16 with three GCSEs and become a team leader in 18 months, while achieving the Duke of Edinburgh Gold [level],” Bryson says. “It will help them with communications skills and with teamwork, all the skills you need in retail - that you need in most businesses really.”

Tesco’s existing graduate recruitment programme is a source of pride to Bryson. Increased recruitment of older workers is on Bryson’s agenda, but Tesco would already seem to have had a head start. The oldest apprentice at Tesco is 67 years old, and the supermarket chain has 44 employees in their 80s. “The great thing for me is, they haven’t been with the company for 30 to 40 years - we had recruited them in their 80s,” Bryson says.

You understand that to put something in place takes a number of years of hard work

There will be a next step in building an internal talent pipeline resource of Tesco’s older employees through the expansion of the company’s Options development programme. Options is intended to help aspirational, motivated employees build the skills and abilities necessary for the next job in their career, and smart employers such as Tesco are beginning to recognise that desire for progression, and the ability to earn, belongs as much to the old as to the young. “As part of our strategy, we have said we want to design an Options programme specifically for our older employees,” Bryson says.

Clearly, Tesco’s recruitment strategy under Bryson’s oversight has many strands. There’s the work experience programme for youths involved with the Whizz Kids disabled children’s charity, which has led to the recruitment of four participants. There’s also the work experience programme for forces members who want to try out jobs there before leaving the military. And even before the recession, Tesco had a long-term relationship with local Jobcentres to help long-term unemployed into work.

She may be a storekeeper at heart, but Bryson seems to be following in what she sees as another Tesco core competency: talent spotting. “I think we are great talent spotters and can see great people coming through behind them,” she says. In her own case, she adds, her first boss at Tesco “saw something in me and took a risk”.

Bryson will work her seasonal two weeks on the shop floor at her local Tesco Extra in her hometown of Kilmarnock. For this head of resource and diversity, it will be a homecoming in more ways than one.

Company Profile

Tesco
A worldwide business trading in 14 countries
Employees
468,508 worldwide; 286,394 in the UK
Status
Third largest grocery retailer in the world
Group sales
£59.4bn, year ending 2008
UK group sales
£41.5bn, year ending 2008
Number of stores
4,308 worldwide 2,282 in the UK

Curriculum Vitae

Home town:
Kilmarnock, Ayrshire
Current role (2007 to present)
Head of resource/diversity UK/Republic of Ireland for stores and distribution, Tesco
2004-2007
Format personnel manager looking after 253 stores across UK and 53,000 employees, Tesco
1997-2004
Store manager: Loughborough; Lanark; Glasgow; Aviemore
1996-1997
Store refit manager
1988-1996
Various senior team roles, North England
1986
Promoted to first senior team manager, fresh foods
1984
Promoted to stock control manager
1982
Joined Tesco on a government YTS scheme

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