UK 
United States
Where were you a year ago, and what people challenges have you responded to in the last twelve months?
Being a retailer, one of the biggest challenges we have is attrition or turnover of staff. So in Pandora, we do what's called Assisted Sales, which means that our sales people in the stores are actually trying to help customers ‘craft memories’. So it's not typical retail where you're just folding T-shirts or stuffing boxes.
High turnover impacts the bottom line of the company. And so we looked at it and asked how do we retain people better? And then we did a bunch of analysis and figured out that it's not rocket science. People want to make sure they're paid really well; they want to make sure that they have career and development opportunities, and want to make sure they have managers that really support them to do their job. So we started to tackle the problem from that perspective.
And how did that manifest itself? What was your approach?
We had a 63% turnover globally. Right now we have around 31,000 to 35,000 employees, depending on our seasonal hiring. So having 63% turnover was really impacting the bottom line.
The other thing we looked at and we saw is that we had an internal promotion rate of only 28%, so we have a revolving door, which is not helping our customers. And then people are saying, you know, I don't feel like I have a career, and the data is also saying they don't.
So we started to approach it by first rallying the whole organisation. We had a discussion in the executive leadership team that said attrition is a critical problem for our business. People are a competitive advantage for Pandora, so how do we take better care of the people?
We want everyone to have a career in Pandora, you don't just come in for one job, but you have the opportunities for more
And we started by looking at the managers. The most important role is the manager role. Are they engaging them? Are they inspiring them?
Now we are running a program called Rise, where we put 900 managers through to equip them to be the best leaders they could be. That was one step. The second is we looked at taking away tasks from the managers and the stores in particular, so that they have more time to actually focus. So we brought in some AI technology and tools, particularly on the people processes, to help smooth it out. And gave managers back 65% of their time that they were spending on people tasks which they could then reinvest in actually having one on ones with people. And then we looked at, how we start identifying and promoting more talent from within.
