Morrisons moves staff from offices to shop floors
Supermarket Morrisons said it will axe up to 720 jobs from its Bradford head office as part of its drive to beef up staff on its shop floors.
The chain said its head office currently employs 2,300 staff, adding that the number of roles at its headquarters had grown by 50% since 2008.
In its supermarkets, Morrisons has begun recruiting 5,000 shop floor staff to improve service, increase availability and open more checkouts.
It said staff whose roles are made redundant will be offered a role in a Morrisons store, or will be redeployed in other parts of the business. It added it will also offer voluntary redundancy.
New chief executive David Potts said: "We are focusing on the things that matter to our customers. That means having more of our staff in our stores, improving product availability and helping customers at our checkouts."
Morrisons said it employs more than 20,000 people in Yorkshire in its manufacturing, logistics depots and supermarkets, adding that roles become vacant regularly.
Mr Potts, who has more than 40 years retailing experience at Tesco, took up his post last month. He replaced Dalton Philips, who was ousted after leading the retailer since 2010.
When Mr Potts arrived at Morrisons he told head office staff he would work in a store over Easter week and that he wanted them to do the same for at least one week each year.
He said last month: "I strongly believe that we are all retailers and we can learn how to serve our customers better when we are working in our stores or when we do our own shopping."
Morrisons reported an annual loss of £792 million last month due to the lower value of its property estate while it posted a drop in like-for-like sales of 5.9%.
The retailer, which employs around 120,000 staff in total, saw sales fall 0.7% to a 10.9% market share, according to last week's Kantar Worldpanel data.
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