Setting high targets and achieving them

The project has maintained the brand’s high standards and continues to keep up with developments in the industry

You don’t get away with much in consumer-facing businesses.

You get away with even less when the consumers are Woolworths’ customers.

Woolworths head of sustainability Justin Smith describes the group’s customers as discerning and passionate. He says management may have egged them on a bit, encouraging high customer expectations.

“They expect more from us than anyone else in the sector, if we let them down they will become cynical about us,” he says.

Expectations were already high when in 2007 the then CEO Simon Susman decided to give South Africans a big stick to measure the company by, or beat them if it came to it. The Good Business Journey (GBJ) project was an ambitious plan around what the group intended to achieve in the next five years.

Before the five years were up the initiative was extended to eight key focus areas — energy, water, waste, sustainable farming, ethical sourcing, transformation, social development, and health and wellness — and now has no less than 200 targets, which are measured on an ongoing basis.

“Our GBJ encompasses all issues that matter most to us as a business, our colleagues, customers, shareholders and wider stakeholders,” says group CEO Ian Moir.

Smith says one of the early challenges was collecting data needed to measure the achievement of targets: “Having the information necessary for setting the goals and measuring achievement was key, it enabled us to integrate the goals into performance scorecards throughout the company, which also meant at store level.”

Having measureable targets certainly helped to focus the efforts of the tens of thousands of people involved in the GBJ. Achieving them meant not only the group’s employees had to come to the party, so did the upstream and