Job Description
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. As the link between sellers and buyers, retail and head office, our retail operations team is the cog that keeps things running. With teams focused on store facing, labour, transformation, online, delivery and contact centre work, we touch almost every part of the business. It’s an incredibly fast-paced environment where you need to pivot not just daily, but often hourly. So while we plan all we can, it’s vital that we all think outside our job descriptions and look to optimise and improve how we do everything. There’s also a real team ethos. After all, it’s people like you who are going to truly transform this part of the business.
With 29 million customers, one of the most visited websites in the UK enjoying a billion visits a year, 89,000 products, 1,000 points of presence and market leading customer propositions like Fast Track Delivery, Argos is a successful, well-loved, recognised and established UK brand. As we progress on our journey, in response to the changes retail is experiencing we have very strong plans to build on our successful heritage to ensure Argos continues to offer outstanding convenience, choice and value to our customers ensuring they are ready for all life’s moments. This is a fantastic time and rare opportunity to join Argos in this vital leadership role.
The Area Manager creates and leads a high performing Area team, demonstrating the values and role models, the Area Manager attributes to deliver a customer centric culture. To deliver business success in an ever evolving and changing retail environment and to drive profitable sales and profit growth, they have a strong commercial edge. Assume total accountability for the leadership and direction of their Stores (up to 45), setting a clear vision aligned to the operational plan and delivering positive results on each of the defined measures. Demonstrating excellent leadership skills, they will inspire, motivate and empower their teams to realise their full potential. In addition, they are the voice of Retail, influencing key stakeholders by building and nurturing strong relationships.
To be successful in the role you will have experience working in retail, including multi-site roles.
More about the role:
- Through values led leadership deliver consistent business performance and standards in line with agreed processes
- Deliver the company key performance indicators each period with consistency across all store formats
- Understand the key market trends and competition; acting on any opportunities and influencing the relevant store support centre (SSC) functions
- Creates a customer centric culture across the Area by engaging and inspiring store teams
- Supports business transformation and lead change brilliantly
- Delivers the stores investment programme (store closures, relocations, new store openings and other investments) ensuring synergies are delivered and a return on investment
- Ensures audit compliance across health & safety, financial services and store processes
- Builds relationships with key stakeholders to connect stores and be the voice of colleagues and customers across SSC functions
- Delivers Retail operations plan
- Creates a high performance and development culture across the Area, developing talent and ensuring a strong succession pipeline
More about you:
- Strong commercial acumen with the ability to identify opportunities to challenge and improve
- Excellent leadership skills with the ability to engage and motivate a remote team
- Experience of working in a fast-paced environment, ability to land change whilst being customer centric
- Experience of building relationships at all levels and balanced emotional intelligence
- Analytical and confident with ability to use judgment and apply intuition
- Own it: Leads the changes, ability to encourage, empower and trust others to deliver results
- Own it: Has a thorough understanding of the business performance and ensures store managers understand the business impact of their decisions
- Make it better: Identifies opportunities to create streamlined ways of working on the Area and focuses on great communication to drive results and standards
- Make it better: Looks for ways of improving service and store teams understand how what they do influences the customer
- Be human: Demonstrates values led leadership, builds great working relationships, inspires colleagues and key stakeholders at all levels
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:
Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 65% of salary, depending on how we perform (in cash and shares).
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private heathcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. You'll also receive a company car cash allowance unless you are going to travel 10,000 business miles in your role, then you'll be able to choose a car. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.
Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.
Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibiity criteria may apply).