Earlier this month, I was emailed our annual engagement survey. What could have been a 10 minute task instead led me to reflect on my activity, learnings and mistakes since I started the Dunelm graduate programme last September. After a couple of hours, I submitted the following.

Starting Out

Among my mathematics course mates at Warwick, I was unusual in my choice to go into retail. But while many others were applying for banking, consulting or actuarial roles in London with large investment firms, I had a positive experience of the Dunelm assessment process and was confident that I would enjoy my time here. Fast forward 6 months and I started on the Dunelm Digital Graduate Scheme in September 2018.

From the beginning, emphasis was placed on the high rate of change within the business and on the need for flexibility: remaining reactive to opportunities, and open to the variety of experience. During my week in store and my second week with Dunelm, plans were already altered, resulting in a 6-week store rotation instead. Working in the busy Thurmaston Store, I served our customers on till and as a host colleague across departments. I worked with colleagues in Pausa and on the cutting desk. I learned how our stores process and keep on top of deliveries. But most of all, I was fortunate to meet some of our wonderful store colleagues and experience the challenges which they face. Looking back, getting so close to product so early on was of great benefit. Having strong store connections is also very useful.   

Into the office

The first few weeks in the SSC flew by. Working with Annie, Shriya and Ian on the new site migration it was a first chance to explore how our future CMS will look and feel; building mock-ups of category landing pages with a modular approach for consistency and ease. This was a time of introductions with members from across other trading, design and marketing teams and a time to take stock of how the wider digital team is structured. Presenting to the exec a few months on, I was asked what I found to be the most difficult adaptation into the office. I replied that it was becoming accustomed to sitting down for most of the day! As silly as it sounded, I had never worked in an office and my afternoons required a good stretch out. An active 6 weeks in store, on my feet and clocking up several miles each day was a sharp contrast.

SEO

After Christmas, I moved into the SEO team, sitting within digital marketing. In my first couple of weeks, I went from thinking ‘SE – what?’ to having a good grasp on the basics. Working with Jamie and Arun, I was able to fire away questions to improve my understanding. Reading the latest SEO news blogs along with my own research gave me good grounds to discuss site opportunities at our catch ups. One disadvantage of working for a company that already ranks well on the SERPS is that there is little low-hanging fruit left to pick, little opportunity to practice the fundamentals. This prompted me to start my own WordPress blog to use as a testing ground. I was fortunate to join our agency at the Brighton SEO event, where I completed a training day about mobile SEO and fed back to the team with some opportunities.

At a practical level, I worked on identifying content opportunities, improving on-site content and site hygiene: eliminating redirect chains and 404 errors. My rotation culminated in an hour-long presentation, delivering an introductory SEO session to nearly 30 people from departments across SSC. Arun and I also plan to adapt our talk to share with Baz and the people team aiming to help them improve the quality of our job advertisements.  

Also of note

On the side of my SEO work, I’ve also been involved in a project with the commercial finance team. Under direction from Sarah and Paul, I’ve been reviewing the algorithm which calculates the quantity of material required for all of our Made to Measure products, and thus the amount we charge our customers. It’s a really satisfying piece of work: building models to represent our proposed changes then feeding in past customer orders to calculate the savings. Improving the accuracy of the algorithm will reduce waste in our manufacturing centre. These savings can be passed on to the customer to make Dunelm more competitive.

Outside of these roles, there have been a number of events and developmental workshops that I have found useful to attend. Arranging a series of introductions with colleagues from other areas of the business has been eye-opening. I now have a simplified understanding of UX, Buying, Loss Prevention, Design, and Agile tech operations – areas that I knew very little about before. Litter picking a stretch of the nearby canal was a well-spent charity day, and activities such as the bleep test (13.3!) and regular lunchtime walks have helped fight inactivity during the working day.

Opportunities

Considering now “what can be improved and what frustrates me”, brings me to the three themes of streamlining communications, our use of data, and ineffective meetings. I welcome the opportunity to share these thoughts and am interested to see if my comments are shared by others.

Slack, Teams, Email, Skype, Zoom…Several pieces of software all do a similar job. In order to keep in touch with colleagues in other departments, I feel that I need to be available of all of them. It seems to be a case of familiarity. Once team conversations and file sharing have been established in one channel there is a reluctance to change. I can’t see an amicable solution to this!

In terms of the data we collect and how we use it, there is ample opportunity, yet also plenty of drive for improvement. Part of this is about sharing information with the relevant teams, sometimes it can feel as though data is very siloed. As an example, some of the buyers were enlightened by the keyword ranking report discussed in our SEO Dunelm Discussion. Through us sharing this data for long-tail keywords, they hope to make more informed decisions on our product range.

Equally important is how we interpret the data. With a mathematical background, I try to challenge the numbers I read, together with their importance relative to other metrics. Scanning through the abundance of information in the trade pack or our agency SEO reports, “So what?”, is never far from the front of my mind. I view learning how to recognise what is important as a key skill to develop.

A combination of latecomers, lack of a clear goal and ill-prepared participants lead to a woeful absence of actions from some meetings. Perhaps adjusting the default room booking periods from 30 minute / 1 hour slots to 20 or 50 minute slots is the first step to fixing this. It would also provide 10 minutes consolidation time for anyone in back to back meetings.

Looking ahead

Looking ahead a couple of weeks, I will have moved across to the ‘dark side’ as a member of Laura’s PPC team. Whilst the ads at the core of Paid Marketing sit directly above the organic search results, the goals of the two channels are very different. SEO aims to drive large volumes of traffic to the site, whereas the main aim of PPC is to operate at a profit. No doubt I’ll be learning a lot more about digital marketing over the coming months.

My thanks to everyone who has supported my journey so far: Peter and all of the Thurmaston store colleagues, Ian, Shriya and Matt in the Beta readiness team, the 2018 graduates: Annie, Jamie and Paulina, the SEO team of Jamie and Arun, Amy, Sarah and Paul in the M2M Commercial teams, the Manufacturing colleagues headed up Chris, the wider Digital Marketing team, all of the colleagues in the SSC Pausa and Paul who helps ensure that the SSC is clean and tidy once most have gone home. I look forward to the next 12 months with Dunelm.

Until next time,

Scott