According to the regulations, every new colleague will be assigned to a certain team. After a four-week trial, team members will vote to decide the fate of this new colleague-the new colleague must get more than two-thirds of the affirmative votes to get a full-time position. This process of deciding whether to hire a candidate according to the votes of colleagues applies to all candidates. John mackey believes that the key decision-making issues should be made by those who are most affected by the decision. For example, the question of who to hire should be decided by those who will be involved with him in the future.
This breakthrough decentralized management spirit runs through every link of the management mode of Whole Foods Supermarket. The small team is responsible for all core business decisions, including product pricing, product display, personnel recruitment and promotion strategy. Taking commodity selection as an example, after consultation with the store manager, team leaders can freely decide the types and inventory of commodities to be purchased, which is very different from the traditional supermarket operation mode.
In Whole Foods, no manager will sit in his office and decide what goods should be displayed on the shelves. Whole Foods encourages stores to buy any products locally under the company's strict product standards. Therefore, every store in Whole Foods Supermarket has its own unique product portfolio. In their respective departments, the team also decides the post allocation of employees by itself, but the store manager has priority.
Every four weeks, Whole Foods Supermarket will calculate the profit created by each team in each store and each unit of labor time, and the team whose performance exceeds a certain amount will receive a bonus. Every team has the right to know all the performance appraisal data of the company, and no team wants to fall behind, so every team is encouraged to work hard.
Whole Foods Supermarket is an invincible and powerful competitor, because it is always competing with itself. Teams compete with their benchmarking teams, with other teams in the unified store, and with similar teams in other stores. Their success is directly reflected in team recognition, bonuses and job promotion. Each store is evaluated by the manager of the head office and the regional director in 300 different ways, and this performance evaluation is conducted ten times a year. The "customer impression" evaluation of each store is made by other stores. This has stimulated the competition among employees.
Democracy and discipline, trust and obligation, unity and fierce internal competition, these seemingly contradictory values have been harmoniously unified in Whole Foods Supermarket. It is this special ability that makes it difficult to replicate the company's unique and efficient management mechanism.