hen Amy Roberts heard about Home Depot’s Aprons on the Floor program last year, she knew her team had a winning idea.

    The program, which the home improvement retailer unveiled in November, invites employees to develop ways to spend more time working with customers. The company’s goal is to convert $180 million worth of non-customer activities into hours employees can spend on the floor.

    As an operations business analyst, Roberts had already been working with her 14-person team to make Home Depot’s 60,000 cashiers more efficient. Roberts and her colleagues realized the 2,000 cashiers who are also frontline supervisors were bogged down with reports they had to produce every week. These ranged from how often cashiers provided receipts to ranking cashiers, Roberts says.

    By combining some reports and delegating others to different groups within Home Depot, Roberts and her team suggested that cashier supervisors file just two reports weekly instead of 11.

    Roberts and her team also devised new metrics to measure a cashier’s success. They center on cashier friendliness and how long customers wait in line.

    "These are the metrics that can bring huge awareness around the customer experience," Roberts says.

    Roberts and her team estimate their initiative could allocate two additional hours of floor time per week for these supervisors. That means 4,000 extra hours of customer-service activities for Home Depot weekly.

    In February, Roberts and her team became the first winners of the program. The company held a luncheon for them and each received an Aprons on the Floor badge, as well as a $100 gift card from American Express.

    Supervisors love the idea, Roberts says. "They are spending much less time doing paperwork and more time working with customers," she says.

    Roberts and her team are already working on another initiative, although Roberts isn’t ready to share it yet.

    "We are still brainstorming," she says.

Workforce Management, July 14, 2008, p. 28 -- Subscribe Now!