Mapping out a Career with Dunelm

Mapping out a Career with Dunelm

Written by John Burgess - Head of Business Analysis

Why is retaining your people so important?

The only thing I can recall from college, during my financial accounting modules, is that my lecturer said, “Cash is the life blood of any business”. My view over the years has led me to believe that people are the true ‘life blood’ of any business and cash is an enabler.

I am sure we have all worked at places where a colleague leaving a particular role has left a painful problem. When an integral piece of a machine is broken or taken away, the output ranges from nothing, to limited and poor-quality produce. If I was to remove your petrol engine spark plugs and replace them with inferior, carbon covered used ones — ok sure you would get home, but it would not only be a bumpy, misfiring journey, but you would also burn a lot more petrol for the same distance covered.

Maybe the employee who left was:

• The only person who could do the role / had the specific skill set
• Popular
• Well networked in the company

This could lead to another blog post about the need for Knowledge Management but for now let’s just say that watching the knowledge walking out the door can cause weeks (if not months) of an inefficient bumpy journey.

Here lies the problem

People will leave and move on — that is a fact of life, but it’s the people who leave because they don’t think the company value them that should really make you question what you are doing for your employees.

It’s not just about money anymore

Salary is a big factor, of course it is and always will be. In a world of spiralling costs, the divide between comfortable living and getting by is changing by the day. Companies have to remain competitive by reviewing the market rates, but remember, it’s not just salary that matters.

Employees also want:

• Skills and training to feel relevant in today’s job market
• Career Options
• Support
• Additional Benefits e.g. Health, discounts etc

What we are doing at Dunelm

I am by trade a Business Analyst. I like to make things visual and firstly it is good to understand what you have, that is why we created this;

This is all the roles we have in technology in Dunelm, drawn out to look like the London Tube Map.

What does this give Dunelm and more importantly our Employees?

Quite simply it shows our employees options available to them.

In the BA space we now have Principal Roles and a Head of Business Analysis role. Individuals might be looking for that next step and so can use the map and information we have about the roles to help shape their objectives, skills and behaviours — getting them ready for a move. It also shows other Chapters and the roles contained within; we have had Business Analysts successfully move into Product Roles and Delivery Roles.

We all should really see our careers as a journey and no longer as a ladder to climb.

Chapters

Firstly, we are committing to a Chapter model, this means managing our people within their disciplines. A good example of this is that we have recently formed our Business Analysis Chapter, putting in lead roles to support the structure and moving all the BAs across in terms of line management.

Using a Chapter model allows us to focus on the roles, collaborate and network across all the BAs in the company. We are building a community where we encourage sharing of skills and ways of working.

Skills — Know your people and play to their strengths

It is important to define the skill sets you need for the roles in your company, while remembering all your people will be at differing levels. Our chapters are starting to define skill matrices; the idea being we can get our people to score themselves on where they think they are. Once we have a view, we can:

• Look for SME or Leaders in a particular skill and encourage them to educate others
• Look for areas we are low as a chapter in general and look for ways to bring everyone up
• Run the exercise again at set intervals to prove we are making progress

Behaviours

We have always had core beliefs at Dunelm tied into our business principles and we are focussing on a behaviour framework to support employees in terms of knowing where they are at and opportunities for growth.

More important to us at Dunelm than what we do, is how we do it — our culture — how we act ourselves, how we give leadership to others, how we make decisions and so on. How we explain what our culture is and what we expect of each other, is incredibly important to our longer-term success.

To help with this, we’ve described the behaviours which bring our shared values to life (Stronger Together, Keep Listening & Learning, Long-term thinking and Act Like Owners). We’ve written these behaviours down to capture what makes Dunelm different and what will make us successful.

In Summary

It’s exciting times at Dunelm, we are really focused on our people and have some great initiatives underway.

We are looking to be open and honest about career options and look to provide the content to support great conversations with our people. Dunelm is invested in providing a great working environment with lots of opportunities.