Oracle Retail Week Awards: Sainsbury’s picks up Deloitte Employer of the Year

When Sainsbury’s took the bold decision to become an official partner of the London 2012 Paralympic Games, it resolved that its employees should be at the heart of its involvement. The result was one of the best examples of employee engagement that the retail sector has seen.

This process began in September 2011 when Sainsbury’s defined a new vision and set of supporting values for the company, in doing so putting its employees at the heart of an operation to be ‘the most trusted retailer, where people love to work and shop’.

As part of this aim it created the Year Like No Other banner, under which it provided complementary programmes and events to drive engagement and help employees to ‘be the best they can’ - central to which was its sponsorship of the Paralympic Games.

Sainsbury’s felt it important that its staff of around 150,000 became engaged with its Paralympic activity from the outset.

Some went into local schools, where they encouraged able-bodied children to try Paralympic sports such as Paralympic football and sitting volleyball, while others provided encouragement and support to a local Paralympic athlete through a partnership scheme.

Employees that did exceptional things were rewarded with places on Paralympic Torch Relays and tickets to the closing ceremony. Additionally, 5,000 employees from all over the UK were taken to watch wheelchair basketball at the Olympic Park on September 3.

History will document the 2012 Paralympics Games as an unmitigated success, and Sainsbury’s played a vital role in that. The fact that the retailer was able to bask in the reflected glow of an event that captured the imagination of the nation was due reward for the risk it took in focusing all of its attention on the Paralympic Games while other brands were clambering over each other to capitalise on the Olympic Games. “When they started on this journey, it was a gamble,” says one judge. But the gamble paid off handsomely.

Members of the judging panel were united in their praise for Sainsbury’s execution of its plan and, in particular, the employee engagement aspects. “Given the lengths they had to go to in order to leverage that investment and get buy-in across the whole organisation, it was a bit of a case study in how to make sponsorship like that really work,” says a judge.

Other judges are equally fulsome in their praise. “They captured it and made it part of who they are,” says one.

“They made themselves better because of it.” Another judge comments: “They’ve taken an asset and engaged with staff across multiple stores - it’s really hard to do that and whip everyone up into a frenzy. The business has driven that.” The feeling among the judges was that all too often, businesses don’t do enough to leverage sponsorships. “Quite often those sponsorships can be a game for the chief executive and chairman,” says one member of the panel. “What they did brilliantly was make it very clear that Sainsbury’s colleagues felt that they owned a little slice of it. Most businesses fail to get that. To do that across a large number of people was very impressive.”

Since the Games ended, the employee engagement that Sainsbury’s initiated has continued. Sitting volleyball has been added into the social association sports calendar in 2013 at the request of employees, while staff turnover figures are at record lows.

Perhaps most revealingly, the number of employees declaring themselves as having a disability through the company’s Talkback website has gone up by 3% on account of a growing confidence among staff to talk openly about hidden disabilities. Legacies don’t come better than that.