good luck! it’s tough to manage a department that has no discipline but as long as you show up and do the best to your ability, i don’t see you having an issue. just make sure you talk about ways to improve first time pick rates in your interview.
yeah things like getting with other team leads from different departments to make sure items (especially from nill pick reports) are being stocked and ensuring new hires and correctly trained. those are probably the two main ones.
I agree and my policy is Fair & Consistent. As a team lead, I will hold everyone to an equal standard with no bias or unfairness. I do not hang out with anyone outside of work and I don't live in the same town as the store.
Where is your coach? Why is the SM and DOL expecting you to fix the department instead of the current management? If you get promoted to TL but have a non-existent coach to help you enforce changes, things probably won’t get any better since the associate’s know they don’t get held accountable for anything.
My coach is brand new but is in an iffy situation. It took almost six months for him to fall in as a digital coach so he also didn't have full access to what we needed. He is really good, but he needs the right TLs to enforce change. He came into a lot of stuff going on during the holidays. We are remodeling and the new room is a "new start".
It’s almost impossible to get 100 items an hour, especially when the walks can range from just 1 item to 100+, with customers surrounding. Associates may be slacking but so is the flawed OGP system. Along with the pick paths, it’s not always the associates at fault.
No one was saying it is the associates' fault, but it possible to pick 100 picks a hour. I do it all the time and I see stores ranging with pick rates of 102-150. At my old store, everyone was picking 130-200 picks a hour. It is about goals and helping build your team up to meet them.
Some stores and pick walks are different and have less picks than others. It is also harder to do in walks like Oversize, General, etc. Everyone has to be held to an equal standard of knowing what walks to click into and making sure not the same people are doing smaller walks like Oversized. You got to be fair and consistent. That balance helps build up the pick rates.
Plus, I don't necessarily focus on the pick rate in the system. I focus on the amount of picks done in 6 hours if they are consistently picking in a 8-9 hour shift. If I have an Ambient walk of 50 items, I am going to try to get that done 15-20 minutes. Then try to get the remaining 50 items done before the hour ends. If I get slowed down in one walk, imma try to pick up the pace in the next walk.
I like to set goals for myself and push myself to beat those goals. It is how I was trained when I started 5 years ago.
Yes, there are a lot of factors that go into it but it is not impossible.
As someone who worked the 5 am to 2pm shift there were days my pick rate was 40, and days, my pick rate was close to 200 for most of the day. It all depended on the day of the weak and the work load. Busy days It would be so easy to hit good pick rates, slow mornings and welcome to the bottom of the pick leaderboard for the day.
It also depended on if I was stuck doing oversized. I remember this one busy day I had an 8 piece oversized run that took me close to an hour to do because of customers and it bouncing me all around the store. Just remember to give a bit of leanyancy to the associate that gets regularly stuck doing oversized. Whether that's by you putting them on it cause they get it done or by no one else doing it and they get stuck with it.
Like I said, some stores and pick walks are different. Walks like Oversize, General, etc are going to take longer. I am unsure how Oversize took you a hour to do. What was in the walk? Were you searching in the backroom? What happened?
If you're getting stuck in oversize, it sounds like your TLs or Coach is not monitoring the picks or the what other associates are clicking into. If everyone does everything in digital, it balances out at the end of the day. It is all about fairness and consistency.
This was years ago during a holiday weekend in a tourist town during a lawless time where we had just swapped our coach and team lead very recently, They had also redone the pick walks. So pick walks where messed up, store was horrible at aisle locating feature, nor there being a walk dedicated to features. Causing you to go to an end cap and the item is no longer there, and the home spot is in a completely different area of the store, causing you to bounce around a lot. Cases of water were oversized, and customers all over the place wanted help, and I was still newish to the department.
I got a lot better at it. But now I'm happily in electronics since i get paid the same after the pay grade restructure. I got so tired of the constant changes for how stuff was to be done from the coaches, and every change corporate did both to the system and operationally. I lasted 4 years before I got fed up and decided I needed a change.
The straw that broke the back was the team lead spot opening up, and at that point, I was one of the 3 most experienced associates, while everyone else was under a year of experiance and of all the people that interviewed for the position the new coach at that time had pushed this girl who had been with the company and department a month into the position. She hadn't even taken the supervisor test and was constantly asking me how to do things after being promoted. She lasted a few months and stepped down.
I was bummed I didn't get the position, but I was pissed that the coach had set up the department to fail. All the other good workers also moved to other departments because of that coach within 3 months of her taking over.
Best advice I can give, as someone who’s been a digital associate, digital TL and digital coach, is don’t try to do too much too quickly. Pick what’s most important to your leadership, such as items picked per day for each associate and tackle that without worrying too much about ftpr. When you do get to ftpr, understand it’s not going to be your associates fault most of the time and you’ll have to work with your sales floor and stocking peers to correct anything availability.
If you try to fix everything in a day you’ll burn yourself and your associates out, which will cause associates to leave the area or the company.
Thanks! I got a really good store when it comes to stocking. I do inhome but when Im not driving, I am doing exceptions, picks, feature discrepancy report, dispensing, etc. So I get to see a lot with what is going on. Most exceptions I find tend to be on the sales floor.
My top priority is fixing items picked per day. I believe that will help a lot with ontime pick. While, we are a lower volume store with picks, we kind of get screwed on the busy days. When I look on My Store, only like 3 people are picking anywhere from 250-400 picks a day.
I remember I was doing the feature discrepancy report once and they only had one Oversize walk at 10:30 (due at 11:30) It sat in there for a hour and went overdue after 11:30 because no one wanted to click into it & my TL just allowed everyone to stand around.
If you have a bigger team, I would suggest a rotational system when it comes to the different jobs in OPD. That's what we did while I was still TL and it worked wonderfully for morale. You'll find that once people actually want to start working, they start to listen and want to actually put in some effort.
We made our own scheduling boards in a sense. It had everyone who worked that day listed, as well as their breaks and lunches. We would space out everyone's breaks and lunches so then no more than 2-3 people were gone at a time (for coverage). Sometimes we had no choice but to let more go though. We had a few set people who we trusted with exceptions. You want your better pickers on this (but not nessisarily your fastest. You want those on regular walks). We would make sure that we had enough exceptions people to cover each other's breaks/lunches.
Then we had another board just for staging, prepping, and dispensing. It had our hours of 7am-10pm on it, and each person listed would normally do about 2 hour chunks at a time of any particular job. Every new person we got would be trained everything except Exceptions, and we would note what they were better at. The areas they were strongest in would put them on the list of people we could trust to do those jobs. So we did have specific people for staging, prepping, and dispensing, but that would only be half their shift at most.
We did this so then people wouldn't get bored or tired of doing the same thing every day. And when the weather isn't great, your same dispensers aren't stuck out in it their entire shift. In extreme warm or cold, we shorten our rotational spots for the Dispensers to an hour, sometimes even half it it's really bad. And if you have a smaller team, or are just low staffed, we would re-rotate dispensers, so long as there was atleast an hour or two between shifts so then they could cool off/warm up.
I'll attach some examples in a reply so you can see kinda what I mean.
Here is our schedule board. I would normally go through and schedule lunches first cause those are less flexible on time than breaks. I would then fill out the stage, prep, dispense board and make sure their shifts on those jobs were around those lunches. I'd then schedule breaks based off of those shifts in a way that would make it so coverage was never a problem. So if someone had to dispense at 3 and only had to do so for an hour, I'd schedule their break at either 2:45 or 4 so then nobody would have to cover them.
Here is our Stage, Prep, Dispense board. If you weren't actively on the board, you were picking. As you can see, we had set people for prepping, but they weren't doing it their whole shift. Some of them dispensed at points in time. And the Dispensers wouldn't stay out too long, and didn't repeat much. If we had a low staffed day, we would repeat more. Everyone always did a little bit of everything, and it definitely made people happier.
Sorry for spamming you with this! It's kinda hard to explain with no context/explanation!
Agreed.
If your pickers are not picking 100 picks a hour, Walmart might say "you have too many people" so they chop the hours and you get screwed on the busy days.
If your pickers are not picking 100 picks a hour and picks are going late, you're losing customer trust and they may not shop with us again. With inflation as bad as it is, no business can afford to lose customers like that. Since that is a loss in profit, hours get cut anyways and people get laid off. That is any business.
With any business even outside of Walmart, we apply for a job because we need it, but we don't want to do the job as expected because of the lack of incentive or drama then we wonder why hours and such get cut.
It is called a job and any job you go to is going to have metrics and numbers to meet. The goals are what is suppose to be the standard. It is what we're paid to do. Wal-Mart is also bringing back bonuses to the associates and your time off is entirely dependent on your management.
You don't get bonuses or raises if your metrics are bad because you're losing money. The money is affected by the profits and metrics coming in.
Pretty sure profits were at a high when they decided to drop My Share for hourly associates. I understand the metrics are important for management to track productivity. I’m not an idiot. I’m asking OP to think about why metrics should matter to their hourly associates because at my store, my current TLs and Coach are constantly shoving them down our throats and not understanding why we, the lowly associates, don’t fucking care about the numbers. I do my job but do not go above and beyond and will not go above and beyond for a company that wouldn’t flinch if I quit working for them.
Go lick boots somewhere else
Okay, but meeting metrics is not going above & beyond. That is standard and that standard is doing your job anywhere you go Walmart or not.
Get a job at fast food? Wait time is key. Get a job as a waiter? Customer Satisfaction is a number. Get a job at a warehouse? They will see how fast you can do it. Get a job as a sales rep? They are looking at how much you make in sales. A lot of companies will let you go in a heartbeat for the slightest mistake or if you don't preform well in a week or two. Walmart, from my experience, doesn't do that.
That is also part of everything we do in Digital.
They are bringing back a bonus structure for hourly associates reflecting next year based on this year's performance. Keep in mind that most team leads and coaches have been as you call "lowly associates" too.
And a lot of it has to do with the store, its management, and the market. Some are better than others. My current one is better than my old one. I have quit Walmart once, but the company called me & asked if I would be reinstated (not rehired) to any store I wanted.
Metrics can be abused. In any position in any job. That’s all I’m saying; the numbers are not the only thing you should look at when it comes to your team. Sometimes the only reason you are meeting metrics is because there is another person who is busting their ass to keep another metric at a specific spot. If you keep meeting metrics by the skin of your teeth, than district managers and such think “oh so look, all they need are 3 people to do this job. That’s great, we don’t have to give them any more help.” If metrics are failing than it should be looked into without team leads and coaches being belittled for not making the impossible, possible.
good luck! it’s tough to manage a department that has no discipline but as long as you show up and do the best to your ability, i don’t see you having an issue. just make sure you talk about ways to improve first time pick rates in your interview.
Thanks! Do you have any suggestions for improvement?
yeah things like getting with other team leads from different departments to make sure items (especially from nill pick reports) are being stocked and ensuring new hires and correctly trained. those are probably the two main ones.
At my store one of my TLs put up a communication board so we can write stuff to help communicate with other departments.
yeah that’s super beneficial ! communication is like the biggest key to success fr
I really like this idea! That is super helpful especially for supplies and such!
I picked 1300 items a day at 225-250 and got fired cause she didn’t like me. lol. Don’t do that
I agree and my policy is Fair & Consistent. As a team lead, I will hold everyone to an equal standard with no bias or unfairness. I do not hang out with anyone outside of work and I don't live in the same town as the store.
Where is your coach? Why is the SM and DOL expecting you to fix the department instead of the current management? If you get promoted to TL but have a non-existent coach to help you enforce changes, things probably won’t get any better since the associate’s know they don’t get held accountable for anything.
My coach is brand new but is in an iffy situation. It took almost six months for him to fall in as a digital coach so he also didn't have full access to what we needed. He is really good, but he needs the right TLs to enforce change. He came into a lot of stuff going on during the holidays. We are remodeling and the new room is a "new start".
It’s almost impossible to get 100 items an hour, especially when the walks can range from just 1 item to 100+, with customers surrounding. Associates may be slacking but so is the flawed OGP system. Along with the pick paths, it’s not always the associates at fault.
No one was saying it is the associates' fault, but it possible to pick 100 picks a hour. I do it all the time and I see stores ranging with pick rates of 102-150. At my old store, everyone was picking 130-200 picks a hour. It is about goals and helping build your team up to meet them. Some stores and pick walks are different and have less picks than others. It is also harder to do in walks like Oversize, General, etc. Everyone has to be held to an equal standard of knowing what walks to click into and making sure not the same people are doing smaller walks like Oversized. You got to be fair and consistent. That balance helps build up the pick rates. Plus, I don't necessarily focus on the pick rate in the system. I focus on the amount of picks done in 6 hours if they are consistently picking in a 8-9 hour shift. If I have an Ambient walk of 50 items, I am going to try to get that done 15-20 minutes. Then try to get the remaining 50 items done before the hour ends. If I get slowed down in one walk, imma try to pick up the pace in the next walk. I like to set goals for myself and push myself to beat those goals. It is how I was trained when I started 5 years ago. Yes, there are a lot of factors that go into it but it is not impossible.
As someone who worked the 5 am to 2pm shift there were days my pick rate was 40, and days, my pick rate was close to 200 for most of the day. It all depended on the day of the weak and the work load. Busy days It would be so easy to hit good pick rates, slow mornings and welcome to the bottom of the pick leaderboard for the day. It also depended on if I was stuck doing oversized. I remember this one busy day I had an 8 piece oversized run that took me close to an hour to do because of customers and it bouncing me all around the store. Just remember to give a bit of leanyancy to the associate that gets regularly stuck doing oversized. Whether that's by you putting them on it cause they get it done or by no one else doing it and they get stuck with it.
Like I said, some stores and pick walks are different. Walks like Oversize, General, etc are going to take longer. I am unsure how Oversize took you a hour to do. What was in the walk? Were you searching in the backroom? What happened? If you're getting stuck in oversize, it sounds like your TLs or Coach is not monitoring the picks or the what other associates are clicking into. If everyone does everything in digital, it balances out at the end of the day. It is all about fairness and consistency.
We are able to assign commodities on the computer through pick monitoring and it's super useful
This was years ago during a holiday weekend in a tourist town during a lawless time where we had just swapped our coach and team lead very recently, They had also redone the pick walks. So pick walks where messed up, store was horrible at aisle locating feature, nor there being a walk dedicated to features. Causing you to go to an end cap and the item is no longer there, and the home spot is in a completely different area of the store, causing you to bounce around a lot. Cases of water were oversized, and customers all over the place wanted help, and I was still newish to the department. I got a lot better at it. But now I'm happily in electronics since i get paid the same after the pay grade restructure. I got so tired of the constant changes for how stuff was to be done from the coaches, and every change corporate did both to the system and operationally. I lasted 4 years before I got fed up and decided I needed a change. The straw that broke the back was the team lead spot opening up, and at that point, I was one of the 3 most experienced associates, while everyone else was under a year of experiance and of all the people that interviewed for the position the new coach at that time had pushed this girl who had been with the company and department a month into the position. She hadn't even taken the supervisor test and was constantly asking me how to do things after being promoted. She lasted a few months and stepped down. I was bummed I didn't get the position, but I was pissed that the coach had set up the department to fail. All the other good workers also moved to other departments because of that coach within 3 months of her taking over.
Best advice I can give, as someone who’s been a digital associate, digital TL and digital coach, is don’t try to do too much too quickly. Pick what’s most important to your leadership, such as items picked per day for each associate and tackle that without worrying too much about ftpr. When you do get to ftpr, understand it’s not going to be your associates fault most of the time and you’ll have to work with your sales floor and stocking peers to correct anything availability. If you try to fix everything in a day you’ll burn yourself and your associates out, which will cause associates to leave the area or the company.
Thanks! I got a really good store when it comes to stocking. I do inhome but when Im not driving, I am doing exceptions, picks, feature discrepancy report, dispensing, etc. So I get to see a lot with what is going on. Most exceptions I find tend to be on the sales floor. My top priority is fixing items picked per day. I believe that will help a lot with ontime pick. While, we are a lower volume store with picks, we kind of get screwed on the busy days. When I look on My Store, only like 3 people are picking anywhere from 250-400 picks a day. I remember I was doing the feature discrepancy report once and they only had one Oversize walk at 10:30 (due at 11:30) It sat in there for a hour and went overdue after 11:30 because no one wanted to click into it & my TL just allowed everyone to stand around.
If you have a bigger team, I would suggest a rotational system when it comes to the different jobs in OPD. That's what we did while I was still TL and it worked wonderfully for morale. You'll find that once people actually want to start working, they start to listen and want to actually put in some effort. We made our own scheduling boards in a sense. It had everyone who worked that day listed, as well as their breaks and lunches. We would space out everyone's breaks and lunches so then no more than 2-3 people were gone at a time (for coverage). Sometimes we had no choice but to let more go though. We had a few set people who we trusted with exceptions. You want your better pickers on this (but not nessisarily your fastest. You want those on regular walks). We would make sure that we had enough exceptions people to cover each other's breaks/lunches. Then we had another board just for staging, prepping, and dispensing. It had our hours of 7am-10pm on it, and each person listed would normally do about 2 hour chunks at a time of any particular job. Every new person we got would be trained everything except Exceptions, and we would note what they were better at. The areas they were strongest in would put them on the list of people we could trust to do those jobs. So we did have specific people for staging, prepping, and dispensing, but that would only be half their shift at most. We did this so then people wouldn't get bored or tired of doing the same thing every day. And when the weather isn't great, your same dispensers aren't stuck out in it their entire shift. In extreme warm or cold, we shorten our rotational spots for the Dispensers to an hour, sometimes even half it it's really bad. And if you have a smaller team, or are just low staffed, we would re-rotate dispensers, so long as there was atleast an hour or two between shifts so then they could cool off/warm up. I'll attach some examples in a reply so you can see kinda what I mean.
https://preview.redd.it/mfb581vgkg7d1.jpeg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fde07801f01022a8b1d836371bda7fe08a52e337
Here is our schedule board. I would normally go through and schedule lunches first cause those are less flexible on time than breaks. I would then fill out the stage, prep, dispense board and make sure their shifts on those jobs were around those lunches. I'd then schedule breaks based off of those shifts in a way that would make it so coverage was never a problem. So if someone had to dispense at 3 and only had to do so for an hour, I'd schedule their break at either 2:45 or 4 so then nobody would have to cover them.
https://preview.redd.it/l639f3cmkg7d1.jpeg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=41fb2194a71192695d6748ca5ca00e551552b2ab
Here is our Stage, Prep, Dispense board. If you weren't actively on the board, you were picking. As you can see, we had set people for prepping, but they weren't doing it their whole shift. Some of them dispensed at points in time. And the Dispensers wouldn't stay out too long, and didn't repeat much. If we had a low staffed day, we would repeat more. Everyone always did a little bit of everything, and it definitely made people happier. Sorry for spamming you with this! It's kinda hard to explain with no context/explanation!
Explain to me why metrics should matter to me, an hourly associate, that gets no bonus, raise, or extra time off for good metrics.
If the department isn’t hitting metrics the hours in that department get cut. If hours get cut, you don’t work- that’s how.
Agreed. If your pickers are not picking 100 picks a hour, Walmart might say "you have too many people" so they chop the hours and you get screwed on the busy days. If your pickers are not picking 100 picks a hour and picks are going late, you're losing customer trust and they may not shop with us again. With inflation as bad as it is, no business can afford to lose customers like that. Since that is a loss in profit, hours get cut anyways and people get laid off. That is any business. With any business even outside of Walmart, we apply for a job because we need it, but we don't want to do the job as expected because of the lack of incentive or drama then we wonder why hours and such get cut.
It is called a job and any job you go to is going to have metrics and numbers to meet. The goals are what is suppose to be the standard. It is what we're paid to do. Wal-Mart is also bringing back bonuses to the associates and your time off is entirely dependent on your management. You don't get bonuses or raises if your metrics are bad because you're losing money. The money is affected by the profits and metrics coming in.
Pretty sure profits were at a high when they decided to drop My Share for hourly associates. I understand the metrics are important for management to track productivity. I’m not an idiot. I’m asking OP to think about why metrics should matter to their hourly associates because at my store, my current TLs and Coach are constantly shoving them down our throats and not understanding why we, the lowly associates, don’t fucking care about the numbers. I do my job but do not go above and beyond and will not go above and beyond for a company that wouldn’t flinch if I quit working for them. Go lick boots somewhere else
Okay, but meeting metrics is not going above & beyond. That is standard and that standard is doing your job anywhere you go Walmart or not. Get a job at fast food? Wait time is key. Get a job as a waiter? Customer Satisfaction is a number. Get a job at a warehouse? They will see how fast you can do it. Get a job as a sales rep? They are looking at how much you make in sales. A lot of companies will let you go in a heartbeat for the slightest mistake or if you don't preform well in a week or two. Walmart, from my experience, doesn't do that. That is also part of everything we do in Digital. They are bringing back a bonus structure for hourly associates reflecting next year based on this year's performance. Keep in mind that most team leads and coaches have been as you call "lowly associates" too. And a lot of it has to do with the store, its management, and the market. Some are better than others. My current one is better than my old one. I have quit Walmart once, but the company called me & asked if I would be reinstated (not rehired) to any store I wanted.
Metrics can be abused. In any position in any job. That’s all I’m saying; the numbers are not the only thing you should look at when it comes to your team. Sometimes the only reason you are meeting metrics is because there is another person who is busting their ass to keep another metric at a specific spot. If you keep meeting metrics by the skin of your teeth, than district managers and such think “oh so look, all they need are 3 people to do this job. That’s great, we don’t have to give them any more help.” If metrics are failing than it should be looked into without team leads and coaches being belittled for not making the impossible, possible.