Assessment Centre exercise design for Tesco Distribution

£1 in every £8 spent on the High Street is spent in a Tesco store, and Tesco made annual sales last year equivalent to over £729 per second, every second. Underpinning this exceptional performance are the distribution and stores businesses, and crucial to that success is the effectiveness and quality of its distribution and stores management team.

Tesco Distribution has been using assessment centres for some time, but, as Laura Davis, Head of HR Routines and Resourcing, explained: ‘We felt it was time for a revamp of our management and senior management exercise suite.’ Following a personal recommendation, Informed Assessment was invited to design a suite of assessment centre exercises which could be used at two different management levels, and which, as well as being fair and objective, would also enjoy both durability and a high volume of use within the business across the whole of the UK.

Informed Assessment undertook a programme of information gathering, drafting and piloting of new exercises involving a range of distribution sites. A suite of practical group exercises, group discussion exercises, role play and written exercises was developed with alternate forms generated - to our knowledge, this is the first time that ‘multiple forms’ of complex written and role play exercises have been developed by any UK consultancy.

A crucial factor behind the exercises’ reliability was the ease and practicality of the scoring, so considerable effort was also expended in developing user manuals which clearly identified to assessors what candidate actions and behaviours they should specifically watch out for in relation to each competency and in each exercise. In effect, this took the traditional ‘assessor rating form’, with its listing of generic competency descriptions, one stage further in terms of assessor user-friendliness.

The exercises were launched and a complementary review of their performance undertaken after three months’ use. Said Laura:  

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 ‘We feel that we now have some much fresher, well constructed exercises that will really help us to assess our candidates’ skills more objectively and fairly.’