I had a fantastic time last night at the Savoy, I was attending a Directors Club dinner and had the pleasure of listening to the founder of the Sunday Times Top 100 Companies To Work For list. Achieving entry onto this list is a longer term aspiration of ours and it was fascinating to hear what people are doing to improve employee engagement. He also made the distinction between engagement and satisfaction, making the point that there is nothing wrong with satisfied employees but that the real prize worth having was an engaged workforce who actively wanted to take your business forward. I am quite realistic as to where Vital are in the process and am clear on how much more work needs to be done. One of the first things that I did as MD was have my team conduct a staff survey to identify the key things that would make a difference to our people, since then, as a team we have spent considerable time and energy making those things happen. I am proud of the fact that we now have a satisfied workforce, achieving this has reduced turnover and started to make some inroads into sickness and absence although there remains much to do. Our next (big) step will be moving towards and engaged workforce and over the coming months I will talk about how we plan to do this.
Finally, for those of you that don’t know, today is Friday which means half price goodies in all our stores after 2:30! 
random outpourings 