For the moment, if colleagues are being asked for their occupation by schools or nurseries they should quote ‘Food Supply Chain – Asda’.
Today has been an even busier day in our stores, if we can imagine that, and it has been especially challenging in central London. Following today's IMG we have reviewed what steps we need to take to maintain everyone’s safety and have taken some decisions today that I wanted to share with you.
We are reducing our opening hours across all of our stores to 8am – 8pm every day, excluding Sunday. We may need to review this again if an industry standard is agreed. All our cafes will be closed too.
We have been reviewing all of our security and guarding provision and have secured additional support for more than 200 stores and again, we will continue to review this.
Today's updates are:
School closures
In the latest update from government you will no doubt already know that schools across the country plan to close on Friday 20th March until further notice.
There will be exceptions for children who have “key workers” as parents. Whilst supermarket workers have been named as 'key workers', we are clarifying the exact details so we can all be sure we will still have access for our children to attend school. We are waiting for clarity from government on their exact definitions of jobs that will be included in the key workers list and we’ll share this as soon as it is available.
For the moment, if colleagues are being asked for their occupation by schools or nurseries they should quote ‘Food Supply Chain – Asda’.
Vulnerable colleagues
As part of its efforts to shield people who may be more vulnerable to coronavirus, the government announced earlier this week that pregnant women, those aged over 70, and those with some underlying health conditions may need to prepare to self-isolate for around 12 weeks.
We know what a worrying time this is for everyone and wanted to reassure colleagues who think that this guidance will apply to them. We will be paying these ‘vulnerable’ colleagues their contracted hours for the 12 weeks when they will need to stay at home.
Recruitment support
We've put a number of different routes to recruit in place to support stores and depots during this time when demand is so high, including family and friends/ exceptional hires, seasonal workers, re-hires, online applicants and agency workers. You can find out more on the Coronavirus WalmartOne recruitment page.
Thanks for everything that you're doing.
Hayley Tatum
