green is the culture at fresh&easy...

In our kind of business, we have hundreds of thousands of contacts with customers every week - people shop our stores frequently.

And it's those contacts in the end, that determine how people perceive our brand.

So from the start, we set out to build a culture based around shared values, and a sense of purpose. That way, our people would just live the brand, while being themselves, with no need rule books or scripted conversations.

I was reminded just how far we've come on this path by our recent set of city meetings.

We do these 3 times a year in all our markets. Tim, our CEO, me and my Executive colleagues go along. We invite all our new team members from the last 4 months, as well as our store managers, to talk about what kind of business we're trying to be, and where we're going.

We've been doing these since we started, when we only had a handful of people, and they've become a real symbol of our culture.

Some of us go on a bit, about the business, about our values, and what's coming up. Then, increasingly central to these sessions, there's a Q&A, where anybody can ask us anything: it's proving a great way us to continually improve the business, as there's no holding back. Finally, Tim closes, with his usual flourish.

What really amazes me though, is how, unprompted, people are increasingly coming dressed up, in green: T-shirts, hats, green wigs, face painting, often to their own design, but all reflecting fresh&easy values (although if you walked in off the street, you might think it was St. Patty's day!).

Attending these, you can understand why we receive hundreds of emails from customers every week, letting us know how great our team members are in the stores. Or why, in our regular surveys, more than 9 out of 10 of our customers are very satisfied with how friendly and helpful our people are.

It demonstrates a simple point - by creating a great place to work, based around shared values, you end up giving your customers great service.

And that, surely, is how it should be...

This is what its like. Check out a video from our last city meeting in Las Vegas..