Asda has said that it’s time for change and in the past month has unveiled a three-pronged plan to deliver a “more consistent experience” across the business.

In recent months, its made several senior hires to reshape its executive leadership team and is investing millions of pounds into stores and customer experience.

While positive changes, Asda’s recent struggles also can’t go unnoticed.

The retailer has faced store strikes, has seen sales decline, and last month it emerged that less than a half of employees said they were confident in the retailer’s long-term plan.

However, with a plan to deliver change, we look at what it will take for Asda to turn around its fortunes, from the shopfloor to the very top.

According to Asda’s annual questionnaire, which was completed by 75,591 workers in June, less than half were confident in the retailer’s long-term strategy and just 50% of staff said they were confident that the supermarket would act on the responses to the survey.

However, Asda chief financial officer Michael Gleeson tells Grocery Gazette that Asda “will listen carefully” to the feedback.

“It is important to the executives, important to all of us that we respond to any concerns or any feedback that colleagues raised during that process and we are working through that carefully.”

He says that in terms of staff confidence, “that kind of evidence is often related to sales, and we do want to improve the position from where we’ve been in Q2 by prioritising three key priorities”.

For the period ending 30 June, the supermarket’s like for like sales were down 5.3% and according to Kantar, Asda’s market share has fallen from 14.8% when the Issa brothers purchased the chain in 2021 to 12.7% last month.

Chairman Lord Rose admitted he was “embarrassed” by the group’s performance.

He told The Telegraph: “I am going to be perfectly honest with you. I’ve been in this industry for a long time and I am slightly embarrassed. I won’t deny that.

“I don’t like being second, third or fourth. And if you look honestly now at the comparative numbers of Kantar or whatever index, we are not performing as well as should be. And I don’t like that.”

Detail Business Consulting managing director Paul Meechan believes that the lower morale among staff comes down to “a lack of confidence in the business to be able to do what it needs to do”.

“I think that general staff have hope and confidence in the management team, but the further outside of that you go such as the owners, the funders, the investors, I think that confidence becomes slightly more tarnished. I would put it all down to the level of debt in the business.”

When the supermarket chain was bought out by the billionaire Issa brothers and TDR Capital in a £6.8bn deal in 2021, it was saddled with a sizeable debt pile,  although in May, it refinanced more than £3.2bn of this debt in a deal that pushes its debt burdens into the next decade.

Asda has a plan in place to turn around trading, which in turn will hopefully boost morale.

Its three key priorities are boosting customer satisfaction, enhanced product availability and a renewed trading plan.

To boost customer satisfaction it is investing an extra £30m into staff hours. It  hopes the move will improve its replenishment of stock during store opening hours and also wants to increase the number of workers on checkouts over the weekends, and provide a more effective cleaning programme in stores.

Gleeson says: “We have invested hours in stores and we’ll continue to listen and respond quickly to colleagues and to customers in a way that hopefully we always do.”

He adds: “What we’re not doing is changing the mix of manned checkouts, scan and go, and self-checkouts. We’ll simply be manning more of the already available manned checkouts for longer. It’s improving service for those who choose to use the manned checkouts.”

Asda will also invest in enhancing availability across all of its categories for the remainder of its second half, including across its 1,000 core grocery lines which it said were most important to customers.

It expects to deliver material efficiencies to make replenishment processes easier and to allow more deliveries to be put straight on shelves.

Lastly, Asda;s renewed trading plan for the rest of its second half has a key focus on driving increased use of its Asda Rewards loyalty app, which just two years after launch, make up 52% of all transactions.

While changes on the shopfloor are afoot on the shopfloor, the retailer has also been making moves in its boardroom too.

Over the past few months, Asda has unveiled a swathe of senior appointments including former Morrisons chief information officer Matt Kelleher as its first ever chief digital officer, former Iceland group chief customer, marketing and digital officer David Devany as its new vice president for ecommerce, and Lidl chief operating officer Matt Heslop to lead its stores and depots operation, including the 470 convenience stores in its newly-established Asda Express division.

Meechan describes the new hires as “necessary”, adding that Matt Kelleher is “a very capable guy” and in terms of  the mechanics and technical side of the role.

“He’s a very good hire and I’m sure he’ll do a very good job. What he did with Morrisons in terms of scaling it, he did a good job within that framework.”

Meechan is equally positive about Heslop.

“He’s been involved in a business that has grown like topsy over the last 30 years and has continued to grow at a rate of knots. It’s a really class hire. What he’s done and been responsible for in Lidl is astonishing.”

The new hires are joining the likes of Kris Comerford, who search consultant Tony Gregg, chief executive of the Anthony Gregg Partnership, says is “an outstanding commercial director”, as he adds that Asda now has “some great people” within its executive team.

However, Meechan says executives such as Kelleher, who joined the business last month, will be expected to make an impact fast. “He is going to have to make very quick successes and they’ll have to be obvious successes both internally and externally.”

“The problem with any new hire is that they go in having said that they can tun water into wine. The days of having 12 months to prove it, particularly when you’re in hock to the extent that Asda is, are long, long gone.”

However, one role that Asda is yet to fill is that of the CEO. In fact, Gregg points out that the new hires have are “taking a risk without knowing who the CEO is, because they could have different ideas and may relate to different people”.

Gregg believes filling the role is critical for all in Asda. “Food retail is 24/7 non-stop sale, it’s absolutely relentless. You need a leader to motivate them [staff], appreciate and thank them,” he says.

In June, Asda said it was “undertaking extensive international executive search to find a permanent CEO” and that while it was taking “a deliberate and thoughtful approach to hire the best possible candidate,” it was a priority for the board.

At the time, City sources said that Asda co-owner Mohsin Issa could pay the supermarket’s next chief executive a package of up to £10m, which would make them the joint-highest earning supermarket chief in Britain, alongside Tesco group CEO Ken Murphy.

The search for a new CEO is still not yet complete, and Meechan says that Asda needs someone who “really knows what they’re doing and is resilient”.

Gregg says that it’s important the grocer hires a chief executive that is people-focused.

“Its always been a people-focused business. This is a big business and they work incredibly hard in supermarkets. You do need that motivation to keep going and a highly motivated, experienced, rounded CEO.”

According to The Times, former Morrisons boss David Potts is seen as one of the leading contenders to take over at the supermarket, with his non-compete agreement set to lapse in November.

Ultimately, Gregg says Asda is really lacking this strong leader that many of its rivals have.

“[Morrisons boss] Rami Baitiéh is pushing customer, Stuart Machin is customer, customer, customer, but you don’t hear that at Asda do you? It hasn’t got a figure and until that happens, the business will continue to struggle and plough under.”

While changes to the business all sound positive, until Asda has found a leader to steer the ship, it may be some time before it it gets back on course.