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Flower Power: Growing Employees at 1-800-FLOWERS.com
July 28, 2006
At 1-800-FLOWERS.com, almost any job opening has several experienced applicants ready to hit the ground running. And you think your company has a handle on succession planning?
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| Connie Adcock |
By Jack Gordon
Six years ago, Laura Word left a job at a convenience store to go to work for 1-800-FLOWERS.com. The national retailer of floral arrangements, gift baskets and other home delivery goods had just opened a call center in her hometown of Ardmore, Okla., almost instantly becoming one of the area's major employers.
Word was 30, a recently divorced mother with two small children. She had neither experience nor any particular interest in call-center work. She says she took the new job mainly because it offered health insurance: "There aren't many jobs for women in Ardmore that do."
She started in phone sales in October 2000 as a ground-level agent?what the company calls a sales and service specialist. Because the center was brand new, she was considered a veteran after the first month and began to act as a mentor for newer agents, explaining the role, answering questions and showing them the ropes.
The gift business is seasonal, so 1-800-FLOWERS.com's call centers staff up significantly with temporary workers to prepare for holidays such as Christmas, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Word became a "holiday mentor" for the seasonal people. By January, three months after joining the company, she was a "holiday mentor coordinator," scheduling, coaching and supervising other mentors.
In March 2001 she applied for and won a role in an unusual company program called GROW (Gaining Rewarding Opportunities at Work). GROW positions are like apprenticeships, typically lasting three to six months, for employees who aspire to management or specialist roles in the company, or who simply want to find out what such roles are like. Word became a GROW training specialist?essentially apprenticed to the center's training manager, known as the core training specialist. Five months later, the core training job opened up. Word stepped into it.
Last August she was named enterprise instructional designer for 1-800-FLOWERS.com (hereafter, "Flowers"), with responsibility for the entire corporation and its 12 brands, which range from The Popcorn Factory and Ambrosia Wine to Plow & Hearth gifts. The obvious and handy candidate to replace Word as the Ardmore center's core trainer, she says, was "my own GROW person." This May she took on a GROW instructional designer to help create training materials and documentation for a newly acquired brand of candies.
Building a depth chart
Except for the speed of her transition from entry-level agent to Ardmore's training manager, Word's story is entirely typical of the way promotions happen at Flowers. She pursued a GROW position in the training function, but at least one GROW slot is available in almost every specialty at the company's five major U.S. service centers: marketing, accounts payable, loss prevention, scheduling, sales and service management and more.
Flowers is a substantial corporation, with $671 million in 2005 revenue and about 2,500 employees, a number that swells around holidays. Thanks in large part to the GROW program, 75 percent of all job openings above the entry level are filled by current employees. According to Faith LeGendre, national director of training for service centers, who oversees the program from Flowers' headquarters in Carle Place, N.Y., at least two senior executives and one director came up through the ranks, helped by GROW.
"It's rare for us to post a position [for which] we don't have a slate of great candidates, interested and ready to go," says Connie Adcock, senior vice president of customer service. "We've gotten to the point of saying that unless you've been in a GROW position, we probably won't consider you. We have so many people who have actually done the job they're applying for that it becomes almost a requirement."
It was Adcock who introduced GROW in 2000, having run similar initiatives in previous jobs with Embassy Suites and National Car Rental. The basic idea is to take the concept of succession planning, ordinarily reserved for a handful of key executives, and drive it down to every level of the business. The most obvious benefit is that at least one highly qualified candidate, and often several, are immediately available to fill most upper-level jobs?candidates who already have performed the very job they want.
But the benefits don't stop there. The best person to fill a job is not just one who has done it, but one who likes it. Better still is a person who understands exactly how his or her department or specialty interacts with other functions to move the business forward?an individual with a grasp of the big picture.
Flowers employees can apply for and cycle through several GROW positions in various specialties, testing the water in scheduling, then floor management, then payroll and so on. People who do so find out what they like and what they're good at. (So does Flowers.) Beyond that, however, they also get a wider view of the company, developing a keen understanding of how at least some of its pieces fit together. And they can pass along that understanding to others, like bees spreading pollen.
Fully half of all GROW participants succeed in landing a higher-level job?but the new job doesn't necessarily follow directly from the first GROW position, as it did for Laura Word. After a three- to six-month GROW stint, an agent is likely to go back to working the phones for a while, sitting next to other agents with less experience.
"Call centers are very fast-paced environments, and when you start as an agent, a lot of things seem incomprehensible," Adcock says: " 'Why is the bridge [the facility's control center] always checking on me? Why don't they leave me alone?' " A nearby agent who has done a GROW stint on the bridge can explain instantly and in detail what the bridge people are thinking, and why. This reduces confusion. And while griping may not be eliminated, Adcock says, it becomes better informed.
Cross-pollination
Training director LeGendre adds that GROW training specialists often introduce new and valuable information to courses, having performed the sales agent's job more recently than the center's core trainer.
Sometimes an agent in a GROW slot finds not just a job but a calling. Nicholas Hunter says it happened to him. In 2001, at age 21, Hunter left a job as assistant manager at a Dairy Queen for an entry-level phone-sales position at a Flowers' call center in Alamogordo, N.M. Newly married, he was attracted, like Laura Word, by the health benefits. And like her, he soon became a holiday mentor?a stepping stone to a GROW slot in training, which opened in 2002. Since 2003 he has been Alamogordo's core training specialist, i.e., the center's training manager.
He took on the holiday-mentor role "just to do something different." But in the GROW position, he says, "I found my absolute calling. I love training. I'm introverted and analytical, so I never thought that teaching large groups would be something I'd enjoy. Now I can't imagine doing anything else."
He has since hired GROW training specialists of his own, some of whom did not find a calling. That's fine, too, Hunter says. "My last GROW trainer is now a holiday sales and service manager. Another is now a holiday scheduling coordinator. Their experience in training helps them perform better in their current roles." What's more, he adds, "My guy in scheduling understands exactly what I need and can talk to me about what he needs. You get synergy."
That synergy is a major side benefit, LeGendre says. "GROW builds relationships within and across departments. People don't work in silos here, unlike other call centers I've seen. People in [functions like] training, scheduling and quality assurance know and talk to each other."
The Sixth Discipline?
Does this begin to sound like a concrete realization of the often-nebulous concept known as a learning organization? That is exactly what Adcock and LeGendre say GROW ultimately is about. Succession-planning schemes didn't figure prominently in The Fifth Discipline, MIT professor Peter Senge's 1990 book that put the term "learning organization" on the map, but Flowers' version of succession planning may qualify as a sixth discipline. And nobody has to salivate at the mention of the word "learning" to appreciate the tangible benefits for the business and its employees alike.
Employees must apply and interview for GROW positions, so the program automatically identifies people who want to learn new skills and take on more responsibility. It spots star performers and grooms them for one or several future job openings. Adcock says that during holiday periods, when a call center's staff can double, it provides people who can "drop into a higher position, and be very good at it, then resume their regular roles"?and for less money than the company would have to pay for permanent supervisors. It gives newly hired employees clear sight lines to advancement opportunities and shows clearly how advancement works, which helps the company hang onto good people. "Retention is a big issue for a lot of call centers," Adcock says. "Our retention rate is 50 percent better than the industry average."
GROW's mechanics are well thought-out. LeGendre explains that agents applying for a GROW opening go through a regular job interview. More accurately, many are taught how to interview, and then coached through the process. The learning library of Fresh University, the company's umbrella training function, contains about 3,000 online courses, including ones on how to write a cover letter and a resume.
"Then we give them feedback while they interview," LeGendre says. "And if you want to be a GROW trainer, for instance, you do a three-minute presentation and get more feedback. We want it to be a constant learning and coaching environment."
During the GROW period, an agent may take any number of online or classroom programs (at a New Horizons Computer Learning Center, for instance) to pick up needed skills. Many of these courses are on software such as Excel or PowerPoint, though LeGendre says a GROW person in the scheduling department, for instance, would learn "the latest and greatest in employee-scheduling software." A GROW training specialist gets a "full certification program" covering subjects ranging from classroom management to the Kirkpatrick four-level evaluation system.
Each GROW trainer also has a weekly coaching session with LeGendre herself, usually by phone. "I try to give them the big picture?the core metrics for our whole enterprise, and why we track things like sales conversions and first-contact resolutions."
She even walks GROW trainers through the details of how to analyze reports and test scores on the company's learning management system. "I'll say, 'See, this person got Question 5 correct but took three minutes to answer it. That equates to more time on phone calls later, which means unhappy customers. See how this all ties together?' "
Similar coaching goes to GROW people in other specialties. Adcock brought to Flowers' GROW program some lessons she learned by trial and error at Embassy Suites and National Car Rental. For one thing, she says, the program must "pull" willing candidates, not "push" reluctant agents into GROW positions. "We're looking for career-minded individuals," she says, not trying to shove more responsibility down the throats of people who just want to work the phones and then go home.
Adcock also says it is hugely important to position the GROW openings correctly and to manage expectations. "We promote this strictly as an opportunity to learn and grow," she says. On one hand, that means discouraging applicants "who just want to get off the phone or make a little more money." On the other hand, the company takes pains to squash expectations that a GROW job is a guaranteed passkey to a higher-level core job.
"People have to know that this is a learning opportunity with a start and an end," Adcock says. "At the end of this, you go back to doing what you were doing before." (That is, unless a core job opens during your GROW stint and you are considered the best candidate for it.) A modest pay increase comes with GROW positions, "and when we add the money, we have to make sure they understand that [when the GROW term runs out], the money goes away, too."
Knowing that the GROW role will end "and then you'll be sitting with your teammates again" affects behavior as well as expectations, Adcock says. "It helps to overcome immaturity problems: 'Hey, I'm the supervisor now!' Yes, but remember you'll be working next to these people again."
Managed expectations or no, what it amounts to for Laura Word is that 1-800-FLOWERS.com winds up offering the very opposite of stereotypical dead-end call center jobs. "There aren't a lot of opportunities out there for single mothers or women coming back to the workplace after raising kids," Word says. "We get people with no computer experience and very little work experience who think, 'I'll just get a little job.' When they get here, they find a lot more opportunity than they expected. I lived that story, and I've watched a lot of other women do it."
That perception may explain why 60 percent of the company's new entry-level hires last year came from employee referrals. "Word spreads fast in rural places like Ardmore and Alamogordo," LeGendre says. "People looking for work ask their high school friends, they ask around at church, and so on." When they do, they tend to hear good things about selling flowers.
Jack Gordon is an editor-at-large for Training. E-mail story comments to edit@trainingmag.com.
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