Dixons Carphone to invest £25m in rewarding and upskilling colleagues

The retailer is also planning to increase its frontline colleagues’ hourly pay to match the real living wage.

For 12,000 colleagues, including in-store, call centre, supply chain and ShopLive workers, the hourly pay rate will increase from an average of £8.88 to £9.50, while those in London will see an added boost to £10.85 per hour.

The pay increase is set to take effect from October 2021 as a reward for all the hard work Dixons’ employees have done throughout the pandemic.

Chief people officer Paula Coughlan said: “We’ve managed not just to survive but thrive throughout this very challenging year that none of us would have wished for or wanted, and the success that we’ve had is really down to the resilience, determination, adaptability and ingenuity of our people.

“It’s a thank you and recognition for that, but also a recognition of how important these colleagues are for our future. It’s something that’s going to benefit 12,000 of our frontline colleagues. 

“What we’ve seen through the course of the pandemic is that customers are changing the way that they shop. More of them like to shop online and that’s been a trend that all retailers have seen, but what we’ve also seen is that they still like to come into stores – and actually most of our customers like the mixture of both.

“That blended model is really important for our future, so in a nutshell, we’re investing in our colleagues – in their pay, rewards, wellbeing and tools – to make this blended way of working a real success.”

Dixons Carphone is also plugging funds into upskilling and reskilling staff, as well as looking after their wellbeing - £25m has been set aside across the past year and the year ahead to invest in its people.

Coughlan said the retailer has trained 6,500 of its colleagues on its new selling framework, and redeployed 3,500 to roles in other areas of the business.

It has also trained 1,000 colleagues as mental health first aiders, offered a membership to the Calm app, and created a mental health corner of its intranet – which has been turned into physical spaces when stores reopened.

“We’ve offered and they’ve consumed about 2.5 million online learning modules – and a lot of that happened during furlough,” Coughlan added.

“We were really surprised by the hunger for learning. We’ve also had this mass movement of colleagues moving to different parts of the business – and training is one thing but you can’t undervalue new experiences.”