Frustrated store managers years ago was the end result of disparate, unregulated and incongruent communications at convenience-store chain United Pacific, Long Beach, California.
“Whoever spoke the loudest was heard the most,” said United Pacific’s Ryan Neaves (pictured left with Doug Dilley, senior manager of customer success executive for Zebra Technologies, Lincolnshire, Illinois). Neaves spoke last week on How United Pacific Empowers Teams Using Holistic Communications at CSP’s 2024 Outlook Leadership conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
Communications were coming in the form of email, phone calls and letters, said Neaves, senior manager of retail operations systems and projects. In addition, an unregulated influx of communications included unverified policies and procedures, no staging or gatekeeping of demand on store teams and unregulated amounts of information and requests.
- United Pacific is No. 14 on CSP’s 2024 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count.
Incongruent interdepartmental communication included the aforementioned loudest speaker getting heard most, departmental dominances and store team fatigue, and inconsistent priorities for store teams.
About seven years ago, Neaves said, United Pacific partnered with Zebra Technologies and its Workcloud Task Management platform. The solution addressed “the tool, the template and the team,” he said.
This one platform consolidated communication, provided a support center to stores and created accountability for both the support center and stores.
“Everybody is held to a standard of execution and communication,” Neaves said. “How we effectively utilize the tool, however, is we created a template,” which provided written rules on how to complete tasks and guarded cadence of communication.
“We got feedback and created custom curated checklist buckets.”
“And when I say template, I literally mean a piece of paper, with rules, even down to what verbs you’re allowed to use,” Neaves said. “Everything is controlled and guided so when someone is creating communication for those stores, they don’t have to guess what they need to write. When the stores are reading the communication, they don’t have to interpret what those words mean.”
For example, he said, “It’s always ‘place’ the shipper.’ It’s not ‘put’ or ‘set’ the shipper.”
Strong Connections
Neaves said he has the ability to speak the lingo of information technology (IT) as well as that of field operations, which creates a strong liaison between the two departments.
It’s also ideal to have an advocate for stores and managers who also “speaks support center and corporate—who can speak interdepartmentally as well as up and down the chain,” he said.
The team aspect to the solution included promoting from within, getting support from IT and having advocates for stores as well as the support center, Neaves said.
Adopting the Zebra Technologies program also included fostering change, talking together and tracking performance, Neaves said.
Getting Feedback
When it came to talking, people were encouraged to speak up and tell management why something couldn’t be done.
“We got feedback and created custom curated checklist buckets,” Neaves said. A checklist might mention a cooler, when the store actually had a kiosk. Problematic wording like this would be corrected because “everything matters. Those little frustrations build and lead to turnover and loss of ROI,” he said. “The more you can make life consistent and fun for your store teams, the better. The point of this tool is that you’re not supposed to think about it. If they just check it and put it away, I did my job.”
“We heavily focused on on-time completion being king.”
Talking together also included having clear lines of communication up and downstream, consistency of agreed-upon standards, and acting on feedback—and tracking performance—both in the field and at the support center.
“We heavily focused on on-time completion being king,” Neaves said.
If one’s company is having communication problems and wishes things can be done better, Neaves said to be honest and admit and identify the problem.
“It’s OK to have a problem, because then you can get the solution,” he said.
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