Recognized as one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers for 2024
Why It Matters
We are proud to be a people-powered business. Our ability to serve customers and communities, to advance our business strategy and to deliver strong returns for investors all starts with the energy and focus of our teammates. Investing in people so they can perform their best, feel engaged and grow rewarding careers is more important than ever.
Our Approach
People Strategy
Being people-powered is one of our core values—and a critical enabler of our ability to deliver on our business strategy. Our multi-year People Strategy is advancing our ambition to be:
We aspire to improve teammate and manager experiences by making moments that matter really matter. Building on our purpose and values, we’re delivering differentiated experiences so teammates can enjoy special places to work, flexibility and career growth.
We continued to make progress and refine our approach to teammate development and experience in fiscal 2024 in response to external trends and challenges, including Canada’s evolving labour market and shifting teammate expectations.
Our approach in this area continues to align with our comprehensive commitments to DE&I, ensuring we are drawing on key experience and insights to create a more equitable teammate experience for all teammates, regardless of gender, ethnicity or cultural background.
Hearing from Our Teammates
In fiscal 2024, we conducted our second company-wide survey, hearing from corporate and franchise teammates. More than 70,000 teammates across the country shared their feedback, which is an overall participation of 78% (91% in corporate stores; 60% in franchise stores). In addition to the annual survey, we hear from teammates across key moments in the teammate experience. Insights from teammate feedback allow us to develop action plans to ensure that we are focusing on what is most important.
Supporting Teammate Development
We continue to invest in our people across a number of career pathways, offering individual support, mentorship, coaching and robust training, including programs tailored for store operations, merchandising, supply-chain management and leadership development. These robust development plans support ongoing succession and talent planning for key roles.
We have been focused on providing and implementing:
Regular formal performance reviews aligned with career development for all permanent teammates
Initiatives for talent recruitment, development and retention—including developing strategies to adapt to meet teammate needs, providing greater assurance and predictability on shifts and wages, and offering more career pathways
Posting open roles as our guiding principle for open and transparent career development
Formal mechanisms to promote an open feedback culture, including teammate experience surveys and new onboarding and exit surveys
Leader training on how to deliver feedback and have tough conversations, combined with skills-based learning solutions for office-based teammates
Supporting teammate inclusion networks and supporting their development priorities
Improvements to our operational data to enable target-setting and build a stronger foundation for reporting, analysis and insights
Quantitative targets and reporting on human capital development and risk assessment
Ongoing workplace succession planning for key roles
Prioritizing team development initiatives to quickly advance new teams to be high performers by focusing on alignment, communication and accountability
Looking ahead, we will continue to invest in the right combination of company-wide alignment around capabilities and performance expectations, while continuing to empower our banners to find the right solutions for regional and local team needs.
Highlights
Canada’s Top Employers
We were thrilled to be recognized as one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers for 2024. This achievement reflects our values-based culture, unwavering commitment to diversity, and focus on growth and development, embodying our purpose as a family nurturing families.
Nationwide Capabilities
Building
In fiscal 2024, we launched new leadership growth and development training available for all office teammates, addressing the development opportunities most important to them. We continued to roll out the Power of One leadership program across our retail network, in our Lawtons business and select full-service locations. We also expanded our growth and development offerings to high-potential teammates. Participants were selected for programs through a nomination process, creating an equitable and inclusive opportunity for all teammates to participate.
Investing in Teammate Growth and Development
The My Journey platform provides support and resources for growing in roles and growing careers. In our operations teams, several industry-leading programs are offered to support teammate growth and build rewarding careers. This includes development programs in supply chain, meat cutting, cake decorating, culinary skills, naturopathy, franchisee-in-training, department manager-in-training and store manager-in-training. Additional programs to support teammate growth include education assistance and scholarship programs.
Advancing Career
Development
We recently introduced new Career Models for teammates to understand expectations and opportunities associated with different roles and performance levels. This is a key tool to both identify and develop our people and future leaders through clear learning and career pathways. In our operations teams, we currently have our largest-ever cohort undertaking certification through our Nourish U training platform, and we continue to offer a range of industry-specific learning programs in all our regions and banners.
Leadership Pipeline
Through a robust talent and succession strategy, we continue to build our leadership pipeline by nurturing the development of future leaders for critical roles at every level of the organization. By taking a systematic approach and orchestrating critical experiences, we can ensure that as promotion opportunities and the need for new leaders arise, we have several candidates with the skills and relevant experiences to advance.
Recognizing Teammates
Our comprehensive teammate recognition programs include acknowledgement of high achievers, long-service programs and company values-based recognition programs. We express our appreciation through in-store events for teammates including BBQs and celebrations of shared holidays.
Champions
In my 20 years with the company, I have been granted many opportunities to realize my career aspirations. Coming from a country that wouldn’t have afforded me this kind of education and mentorship, I am so grateful for the ongoing training and learnings that have helped me become a better leader for my team. Feeling supported as you take such big leaps in your career is vital, and I’m happy I now get to be a part of my team’s professional development as well.”
Biviana Sanchez, Store Manager, Safeway
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Taking care of our teammates includes prioritizing their health, safety and wellness and empowering them through our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.
As a family nurturing families, we want to ensure Canadians are taken care of today, tomorrow and in the future. By doing OurPartR for the environment, we hope to inspire our customers to do theirs. Every step we take together—big or small—can make a difference.
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