Store Practice Card: Capture a Routine for Local Review

1. Name one observable store moment

Start with an event, not a broad capability. 'Handle an unresolved collection order at shift handover' is recordable. 'Deliver excellent service' is not. State when the moment begins, what a successful handoff looks like and which roles take part. Keep the unit small enough for an experienced colleague to walk through during paid work time.

• Trigger: what starts the routine?
• Endpoint: what must be true when it finishes?
• Roles: who acts, who receives the handoff and who can stop or escalate it?
• Boundary: which adjacent tasks are outside this card?

2. Record the routine and its source

Ask a colleague who performs the work to demonstrate or narrate one recent, permitted example. Record observable actions, information used and decisions in order. Link each instruction to its approved procedure, system field or accountable owner. Mark any local workaround as a claim to review, not an instruction to copy.

• Step and role responsible
• Information or tool needed at that step
• Decision rule in the colleague's own practical terms
• Approved source, owner and review date
• Local workaround requiring approval, replacement or removal

3. Add the conditions and exceptions

The same sequence can work differently at opening, during a promotion or with a system outage. Record the conditions under which the source store uses the routine and the cases in which it stops. Do not compress privacy, safety, employment or regulated-product decisions into a general best-practice card.

• Trading period, demand pattern and staffing assumption
• Required system access, equipment and physical layout
• Language, training and role permissions
• Known edge cases and the approved escalation route
• Information that must stay in an approved system rather than a parallel note

4. Label the evidence without ranking stores

A higher-performing store can be a useful place to investigate, but a KPI gap does not show that one routine caused it. Record what was observed, the comparison period, other changes and what remains unknown. Use 'candidate practice' until an appropriate evaluation supports a stronger claim.

• Observed: what people did and when
• Associated: what measure moved during the same period
• Alternative explanations: demand, staffing, promotion, system or manager changes
• Status: described, approved locally, tested locally or tested elsewhere

5. Ask the receiving store for a fit decision

Send the card to a named person who understands the same work moment in the receiving store. That validator checks the need, procedure, systems, roles and exception paths against local reality. The output is one of three decisions: ready for a transfer brief, revise before testing, or do not transfer. It is not an instruction to launch.

• Does the same operational problem exist here?
• Which steps conflict with current local procedures or permissions?
• Which required conditions are absent or materially different?
• Who must approve any adaptation?
• What evidence is still needed before a bounded test can be designed?

Why this guide is useful

Use this field card to make one store routine reviewable. It ends with a receiving-store decision on local fit. The separate transfer guide covers adaptation, trial design, measures and withdrawal once a candidate is ready.

Capture the work moment without turning it into a rule

A useful card stays close to the work. HSE guidance on procedure design recommends walking and talking through a task with users, choosing detail for the task and user, and keeping procedures under review. OSHA's worker-participation guidance likewise includes frontline involvement in analysing tasks and documenting safe work practices. These are design disciplines, not proof that a local routine is safe, compliant or effective elsewhere. Current company procedures, risk controls and specialist owners still govern.

Concrete example

Fictional example: a Bristol store documents its click-and-collect exception handover. At shift change, the colleague records the order status, promised collection window and next action in the approved order system, then assigns the next action to the on-duty role. The store observed less duplicated checking after introducing the routine, but order volume and a system update changed at the same time, so the card does not claim that the routine caused the difference. A Boston store receives the card. Its curbside process uses different fields and roles, so its operations lead marks the original wording 'not ready', maps the three information needs to local approved fields and asks the privacy owner to review the handling of customer information. Only after the local operations and privacy owners approve the revised scope is the card ready for a separate, bounded transfer test. No outcome is assumed.

Sources

• HSE: Procedures and human factors
• OSHA: Worker participation in safety and health programmes