In July 2003, Best Buy Store 484 in Manchester, Connecticut, got its employee survey results back. The store’s general manager, a 13-year retail veteran, had been running it for less than a year. “It was honest,” he said later, “and it hurt.”
This story comes from Gallup, whose survey Best Buy used, as told in Gallup’s own Management Journal in 2004. By that account, a typical Best Buy store then was 45,000 square feet, open 77 hours a week and staffed by 120 employees, many of them young adults in their first or second jobs. Best Buy measured engagement with Gallup’s Q12, a 12-item survey, and put the score on each manager’s scorecard.
Store 484 was good but not great: compared with Gallup’s database of workgroups, it barely made the top third. Two items scored especially low, “At work, my opinions seem to count” and “My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.” The overall score had gone up since the previous survey. Those two had gone down.
“That ‘opinions count’ thing really worried me,” the manager said. “That just tells me we’re not good listeners.”
At the next quarterly all-employee meeting, he asked everyone to put a sticky note on the item they thought the whole store should work on. The notes piled up on “committed to doing quality work.” Many carried a suggestion. “We want ‘team close,’” some said. “We want everyone to be treated the same, and we want to walk out together as a team.”
Closing a store means shutting registers, restocking shelves and turning off hundreds of display items. At Store 484, how it went depended on which assistant manager was on duty. The store closed at 9:30 p.m., but some associates were still there near midnight while others were long gone. “To the associates, that’s like a merry-go-round,” the manager said. “They start trying to manage the manager.”
He and his five assistants agreed on three changes. The managers would give the same answers. Associates who weren’t pulling their weight were asked to leave Best Buy. And the store would close as a team, with the late shift scheduled for it. Out of 120 people, the manager reckoned, maybe 70% would buy in, 20% would say “We’ll see” and 10% wouldn’t like it. The new routine started as the 2003 holiday season approached, and was adjusted when keeping everyone until closing ran up too many labor hours.
The next survey came in January 2004. “It was nerve-wracking,” the manager said. In Gallup’s telling, Store 484 jumped to the top 10% of workgroups in Gallup’s database, both problem items rose, and the store was performing well against budget with substantially lower turnover.
Six years later, a Harvard Business Review article put a price on such scores. At Best Buy, it reported, a 0.1% increase in employee engagement at a store was worth more than $100,000 in that store’s annual operating income.