Circle K launches call to action to stamp out staff harassment

Circle K is urging the wider European convenience industry to support its Kindness Day initiative, which aims to stop customer harassment of frontline store workers.

The anti-harassment push follows internal staff surveys across Circle K’s European markets, as well as external surveys in the wider retail and service industries.

“It started off with work in Norway and Lithuania on the topic and what our store employees are experiencing out there,” reports Preben Kristiansen, head of people at Circle K Europe. “We got the numbers and started to look more into it and did surveys and we saw that more than 50% had experienced harassment.”

Circle K had already been running country specific anti-harassment campaigns based on the framework and tool kit launched by its HSE in June 2022.

“But we really thought we could do something on a European level across our network,” Kristiansen says. “Then it struck us – it’s not just a Circle K issue, it’s an industry problem so we thought why not try to encourage and create this ‘call to action’ message to the rest of the industry that we need to make sure our customers are kind to our employees.”

That thinking led to the creation of the Circle K Kindness Day with the inaugural event taking place on 25 January 2023. According to Kristiansen, the initiative aims to encourage customers to be kinder to employees and equips stores with a tool kit including giveaways,posters, stickers and badges featuring messaging which asks customers to be kind to employees but also thanks and acknowledges kind behaviour.

Feedback from Circle K’s own employees found that if there was a long waiting line for a burger, for instance, some customers would get “super annoyed and start yelling at our employees because they are not working fast enough”, so the retailer created a poster asking ‘Please be kind, we are working as fast as we can’.

“What we saw was most of our customers are treating our employees the way we would expect them to but some are not and when we said ‘Thank you for being nice’, we aimed also to remind those customers who weren’t, when they saw the signs around in the stores,” Kristiansen reports.

“We also had some small tokens of appreciation we could give to our customers that were kind to employees, for example, a small chocolate to say ‘thank you for being nice’,” he adds. “That was what started the idea behind the Circle K Kindness Day.”

The Kindness Day initiative scored impressive media coverage in markets including Ireland and Lithuania and the reaction was extremely positive, Circle K reports.

“I could see and feel from social media that people endorsed it and acknowledged it was an industry-wide problem, which the surveys show,” says Kristiansen. However, Circle K didn’t want the initiative to be a one-off campaign, to sit back and do nothing for a year and then possibly do something in 2024. “This is something which needs to be always on within our company,” Kristiansen says. “The next step will be for some of our industry colleagues to follow us and do something around anti-harassment and we want to share best practices and tool kits if needed,” he adds.

The motivation for the kindness campaign was crystal clear from the offset, as Kristiansen explains. “For us, our people are the main and most important asset – we are nothing without our people out in the store. When we see that we have employees that are harassed out there, and some more than others, we can’t just sit down and do some online training and that’s it.

“We need to have a holistic approach from our store managers right up to Hans-Olav [EVP Operations Europe at Circle K] and that through the entire organisation we are not just talking the talk but walking the walk.

“We are open 24/7 at most of our stores and, while we can never guarantee that we will not get a customer coming in that is not treating our employees with respect, our employees should know that we are doing whatever we can to make sure that the customer behaves well. If he or she doesn’t, our store employees should feel comfortable that we are doing everything we can and give whatever support is needed to our store employees that have experienced harassment in the workplace,” he says

Circle K’s business unit leaders are focused on measuring the company’s work within harassment through the reports the company receives. This creates invaluable data for the retailer on which it can act.

“It’s not just about getting reports in, although that’s important because the more data we have the more we can do about it, it’s also what we do with the data,” Kristiansen says.

“We will also conduct surveys for our store employees to measure if they feel that we are doing our task as an employer when it comes to harassment – are we following up or what else can we do? We’ve not quite finalised those questions but we will send out surveys to be able to measure how our employees feel we are doing on this topic,” Kristiansen says.

“We’ve also made it super, super easy for our employees to report,” he continues. “In every store they have a poster with a QR code that employees can scan and it takes them straight into the reporting tool. So, within a minute our store employees will be able to report harassment. And it’s not only customer behaviour to employees it’s whatever sort of reports our store employees feel that they need to do.”

And the business is anticipating more reporting from customer service representatives versus store managers now the QR code is live.

In terms of education, meanwhile, Kristiansen reports that more than 50% of Circle K personnel – more than 8,000 people – have completed the recently launched harassment training since it was launched last month (February 2023).

By inviting the wider industry to join the kindness campaign, Circle K is also willing to share elements of its tool kit, which other retailers can modify accordingly.

“Some stores wanted to say ‘thank you for being kind’ and some wanted to say ‘please be kind’,” Kristiansen. “That’s dependent on what results we see from our survey from industry or our internal surveys and whether we want do a little tweaking.

“We also have some ideas on what we can do to celebrate the customers that are actually kind to our employees – we want to celebrate the friendliness,” he adds. “The majority of our customers are grateful for our employees, so it’s finding that right balance and calling out the ones that aren’t and actually are.

“When it comes to the tool kit, we are very open to this not being a Circle K Kindness Day, rather the opposite. Next year we want it to be the industry celebrating a Kindness Day and focusing on the same things that we did this year. If we are doing this together with other retailers next year, we can look at how we can take it to the next level,” Kristiansen maintains.

In addition to sharing aspects of its kindness tool kit, Circle K is also keen to showcase its activity on social media, its external surveys and the role of VPs or business leaders played being out in store, talking and inviting media coverage at Circle K stores.

In Denmark, for instance, Circle K achieved TV coverage for an interview with a store employee who had experienced harassment – a customer had thrown a water bottle at her – and the report was linked to a sociologist discussing the reasons behind those types of abusive behaviours businesses are experiencing now (see video here).

That chimes with recent media reports In Norway, which showed customers who were facing a tough time economically, due to inflation, were taking their aggression out on store employees and giving staff a hard time for products being more expensive.

Circle K’s country manager in Lithuania also secured national TV coverage for the kindness campaign by joining forces with an organisation that had strong engagement and messaging around harassment. Elsewhere, Ireland won strong coverage in newspapers and on TV and countries in the Baltics achieved national coverage too.

For Circle K, success of the kindness campaign would be measured on two spectrums – internal and external.

“In terms of internal success, putting this on the agenda and continuing to do so throughout the year and years to come would be key,” Kristiansen says.

“However, we saw that it’s an industry issue and we need to get our colleagues in the industry to join this effort. That’s not me saying they are doing nothing because they probably do tonnes on their turf as well but I do think that the joint messaging around this initiative is not that it’s just a Circle K, 7-Eleven, Walmart or Tesco problem, it’s more of a retail problem and we want to face it together. That would be how external success would look like for us – to join forces and next year have a European or global Kindness Day to celebrate all the customers out there who are treating are employees with respect,” he concludes.

Get Involved

If you are interested in learning how to support the Circle K Kindness Day initiative, contact us to learn more and be connected with the program.