Green Valley Megastore Case Study Essay

Green-Valley Megastores Green-Valley Megastores was a part of a large business group having investments in diverse businesses like pharmaceuticals, luxury hotels, textile manufacturing and exports, and food processing. The mega-stores were aimed to give the customers a truly international shopping experience—a one stop destination where entire families could enjoy a day together—watching movies, shopping, eating out and playing games in an unmatched ambience. This concept of shopping-cum-entertainment had paralleled the growth of shopping malls in India. Today, the customers who did not prefer to just watch movies at the old-fashioned movie halls had the option of going into multiplexes which offered more than one movie show at a single time, along with the option of spending time at multiple shops or restaurants at the same time within the same complex. This was designed so that the customer need not travel from place to place in search of different products – but could have it at one place. With this, the businesses tried to replicate the weekend holiday concept of the West where an entire family could spend a day out engaging itself in watching movies, shopping and eating out. To further this aim, Green-Valley Megastores had invested in multiplexes with floor space varying from 20,000 square feet to 40,000 square feet in prime locations in different cities. The shop-space was then leased out to different brands—who would sell their products within the multiplex. Thus, there was a wide variety of products in a single multiplex—ranging from dress material (which itself had different varieties of ethnic wear, western wear, leather accessories, sunglasses, fine jewelry, and saris) to shoes, electronics, toys, groceries and foodstuff, etc. In terms of product offering, these shops within Green-Valley offered a wide choice to their customers. Not only did Green-Valley offer the finest brands available in India, but it also offered a world-class ambience and service, with the widest choice. A customer could browse through the offerings to their hearts content without any pressure of buying through serene ambience in the classy glass and marble interiors designed by international architects. There was enough  space for them to rest, take a break, have refreshments while shopping and then continue again. Staff at Green-Valley While the shops within each Green-Valley Store had its own staff, Green-Valley maintained its own staff to take care of housekeeping (cleanliness of public space like lobbies, staircases etc.) manage the car park, and provide security services. The staff at Green-Valley was trained to be unobtrusive; they were supposed to be present and vigilant at all times and respond to a specific customer request only when the customer required. They were there to help one make a choice or serve quietly and efficiently. With constant in-depth training, the Green-Valley staff was required to offer service to all customers with a positive attitude, pleasant disposition, and good communication skills Organizational Structure Each store was managed by a store-in-charge who was supported by four managers. The different managers took care of security, housekeeping, services and accounts. The staff strength for security, housekeeping and services varied from store to store based on the requirements. While the housekeeping took care of the general cleanliness of the stores, services department took care of the maintenance of the lifts, electrical equipment, fire-fighting equipment etc. Both the housekeeping department and the services department relied on contractual staff instead of permanent employees. See Figure 1 for the organizational structure in the following page. Figure 1 Organizational Structure in a typical Green-Valley Megastore. Performance Appraisal for Megastores’ employees Performance appraisal for the store employees was carried out on an annual basis. Each of the employees were evaluated by their superior (refer Figure 1). The store-in-charges of different stores were evaluated by the Regional Managers. The Regional Managers were in turn appraised by the General Manager (Operations) who used to be located at headquarters. The regional managers had targets in terms of business development – getting new customers for floor space in the mega-stores. They had to achieve the targets in terms of lease rent from the stores in their regions. For the store-in-charges the nature of job was more of managing the facility for their customers. Each store had two categories of customers – the tenants and the shoppers. It was the responsibility of the store –in-charge of a Mega-store to ensure highest quality of service to both the categories. Performance Appraisal Process Only those employees who had completed a year in the organization were eligible for performance appraisal. There was no appraisal for the contractual staff or part-time employees. The appraisal process was carried out for all the eligible employees simultaneously in the February to March period. The appraisal process was initiated by a meeting conducted by the Store-in-charge where the announcement of the appraisal process was made. It was mandatory for all eligible employees to attend the meeting. During the meeting the eligible employees were informed individually about the date of his / her performance appraisal. The employees are asked to be prepared for any sort of situations or questions during the appraisal. As an important step of their career, employees took the appraisal interview seriously. Stage 1: Self appraisal This was the first step in the appraisal process at Green-Valley, where an employee has to rate himself from 1 – 6 where 1 is the lowest and 6 the  highest grade. The employee was handed over a form with following five parameters (refer Table A). The parameters were based on the important aspects of his/her responsibility in Green-Valley and had different weights. The employee had to grade himself/ herself on those parameters. Stage 2: Assessment by Appraisal Committee The appraisal interviews were carried out by an Appraisal Committee that was formed for each store. The members in that committee were the Store-in-charge and two HR managers from the headquarters. The committee would carry out interviews of the employees and based on the interviews would give their assessment of performance. On a single day nearly 4-5 employees were appraised. The committee would start the interview using the self-assessment as the basis, probing reasons why a particular employee had rated himself 6. In most cases employees used to rate themselves on the higher side—typically either 5 or 6. For each of the parameters, the appraisal committee had a set of questions which would examine the employee. For example, reliability would be probed with questions like: 1.Where were you when so and so incident took place in the store? 2.If a customer has forgotten her purchases in the lobby – how would you locate the customer to give it back to them? The appraisal committee would make its own assessment and give marks on the 1 to 6 scale. TableA: Performance Assessment Form Name: _______________________________ Store Location:________________________ Assessment Period:_____________________ S. No.Performance DimensionsWeights (in %) WSelf RatingCommittee Rating RW X R 1.Customer focus20 2.Task focus15 3.Upkeep of uniform and self 15 4.Discipline & Attendance10 5.Honesty & Integrity10 6.Communication10 7.Initiative 10 8.Reliability10 Total Raw Score: Total of WxR 100 Additional achievements by the employee: Comments by the Appraisal Committee: Signature of the committee members: Final Score: Signature of employee: The marks were used to derive the grades. The grading was done as per the scheme depicted in Table B. Table B: Grading Scheme Marks cut-offRating > 5.5Outstanding 5 – 5.5Very Good 4.5 – 5 Good 4 – 4.5Adequate