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Even in a year of economic crisis, X5 continued to
create significant numbers of new jobs thanks to
the growth of our business. X5 employed 68,457
people at the end of 2009, an increase of nearly
8,000 or 13% over our 60,467 headcount at year-
end 2008. We invest significantly in staff training
and development to ensure quality service for our
customers, and provide employees and managers
with career development opportunities.
While X5 outperforms most of its Russian
competitors in terms of sales per employee, there
is significant potential to drive further productivity
improvements compared to Western retailers.
Over 80% of employees are in-store personnel,
so in 2009, X5 began to focus on ways to increase
productivity levels here towards international
benchmarks.
We conducted bottom-up and top-down analyses
to assess the efficiency of in-store personnel
task fulfilment, as well as the impact of various.
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Business processes on staff productivity. Our
conclusion is that there are major opportunities
for raising productivity significantly by
implementing new technologies, processes and
staff training and development. To illustrate one
simple example, reorganising the baked goods
department can lead to a threefold increase
in store assistant productivity. As X5 moves
toward greater process automation in stores and
greater centralisation of supplier, distribution
and pricing functions, we expect in-store staffing
requirements to decrease over time. Overall, we
plan to improve in-store staff productivity by at
least 10% to 12% by the end of 2011.
At the same time, we believe X5 total employment
will continue to increase steadily in coming years as
we open new stores. The productivity improvement
measures we have introduced will ensure we have
the financial and human resources required to
sustain this growth. |