Community Engagement by LIDL

This report discusses the community engagement activities of LIDL, a German discount supermarket chain. It explores their relationship with stakeholders and the ways in which they engage with them. The report also highlights the impact of community engagement on employee knowledge and skills.

COMMUNITY
ENGAGEMENT

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY..................................................................................................................................3
Community Engagement by LIDL..............................................................................................3
Stakeholder’s engagement...........................................................................................................5
Social media.................................................................................................................................7
Training employees on multiculturalism.....................................................................................7
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................8
REFRENCES.................................................................................................................................10

INTRODUCTION
Community engagement refers to a process in which organisations are working
collaboratively with a number of different groups of people who are affiliated by different
geographic proximity, similar situations to address, special interest and their well-being. It is an
effective and powerful vehicle which helps in bringing various behavioral and environmental
changes that can improve health of a community and all the members and community (Ebner,
2020). There is often qualifications and partnership involved which helps to mobilize the
resources and also bring changes in systems through changing various relationships amongst
partners. In the following report various activities for community engagement carried on by
LIDL is discussed. It is a German international chain of discount supermarkets which is
operating more than 10,000 stores throughout Europe and United States. The company was
founded 90 year ago in 1930 by Josef Schwarz. The report discusses about various social
programmes which are conducted by LIDL. Along with his description on relationship of
organisation with their stakeholders and ways in which their engage with the stakeholders are
also discussed. Ways in which community engagement have effectively evolved knowledge and
skills of employees in organisation or also discussed in the following report.
MAIN BODY
Community Engagement by LIDL
The vision statement of LIDL is to make life better by providing good quality food at
markets and ensuring maximum customer satisfaction.
Their mission is to deliver outstanding customer satisfaction. They are guaranteeing good quality
food through product development and quality control processes. They ensure to lead market
value by optimising their efficient processes. LIDL is working with a number of different
business partners in sustainable relationships to contribute positively to the local communities.
They are also achieving long-term success by investing in recruitment, training and development
of the exceptional talent they have in their organisation (Planing and et. al., 2020).
LIDL focuses on philosophy of sustainability in order to provide safe and cheating
environment to all their colleagues and also be active and positive contributors to communities in

which they are operating. Their business challenge is to develop a strategy which is
comprehensive enough to show their commitment towards sustainability and win the buy in from
their external as well as internal shareholders. They have also developed a systematic approach
in order to manage their progress and monitor it towards their targets in order to make sure that
they can measure their progress on the focus areas. Their strategy is ‘A better tomorrow’. This
comprises of four major pillars which are responsible sourcing, protection of the environment,
production of team LIDL and LIDL community works. With the help of these four pillars they
are focusing upon major topics to the business as well as their stakeholders. This is a program
which is headed by the head of corporate social responsibilities of the company. In order to
successfully achieve their objectives company requires capital investment, employees and time
of their partners which is allotted to corporate social responsibilities (Dekimpe and Geyskens,
2019). The major challenge for LIDL was to operate so many stores and ensure their standards of
waste and energy in all the stores. It was necessary to maintain enthusiasm in order to raise funds
which was very challenging for organisation. This also required continuous auditing and
encouragement of all the stakeholders of organisation in order to make sure that all the objectives
were met.
There were a number of benefits which were attained by organisation which included
reaching out to all their customers and also increasing the internal engagement of employees in
the organisation. They started a number of environmental programs which also helped them to
save money. When taking benefits externally company have effectively built their reputation and
influence the number of communities in the areas they are operating. The strategy of a better
tomorrow have brought out a number of positive differences in company which included
achieving a land filled with zero waste and meeting all the ISO standards for energy
management. The company also successfully raised a fund of £400,000 in Ireland. They took
help from their charity partner jigsaw. They are also successfully donating 50,000 meals every
month to a number of different charities which are certified and listed.
LIDL is making use of different communication channels in order to promote their
strategy a better tomorrow internally as well as externally. They also have an application
available to all the LIDL employees which have different features such as in-store messaging,
customer newsletter and also sustainability report. This application is called WeAreLidlApp.

Along with this they are also promoting their charity partner jigsaw and sponsoring various
support for Ladies Gaelic football through different events and advertising methods.
Stakeholder’s engagement
Company is effectively working on three major dimensions which include all of their
stakeholders. They are working on environment in order to minimise the negative impacts by
them on environment, increasing interaction with the local community partners and organisation,
supporting and engaging the employees and stakeholders at workplace and interaction with local
community at market place as well. Below mentioned is a description of these four major
dimensions:
Environment: LIDL have successfully shifted towards making a low carbon economy.
They are focusing on efforts of energy efficiency, waste production and renewables throughout
all the process of their operations. They are now focusing upon reducing their environmental
impact by taking a carbon footprint analysis of all their operations together (Lowe and et. al.,
2019). They are now using key indicators through analysing the areas they had major impacts
upon. They are also successfully developing a strategy for targeting the climate change in order
to reduce their environmental footprint and also optimise all the processes they are carrying on.
There is huge amount of environmental footprint involved in maintenance of their operations and
construction (Di Napoli, Dolce and Arcidiacono, 2019). They are now trying to mitigate these
impacts through using sustainable designs of construction and management of their own stores
and distribution centres. This will help them to successfully sustain for a longer period of time in
the market and also achieve benefits for environment. All the operations of LIDL are now
certified by ISO of energy management standard as they have moved up to sourcing green
electricity from 2018. They have undertaken one more major development through integration of
solar photovoltaic panels and electric vehicle charging points in their new building projects.
LIDL is now one of the largest network of electric vehicle charger provider when taking the
supermarket sector into consideration. They are enabling all their customers to charge their
electric vehicles for free as their shop.
Community: The major objective of LIDL is to establish as a good neighbour and
contribute to the communities where they are living and working. They are also continuously
developing their community work and bringing fundraising initiatives for their charity partners,

volunteering through a number of different programs and also providing employment
opportunities in community. They have successfully partnered with jigsaw which is a national
Centre for youth mental health and have benefited from fundraising activities through them.
They are also aiming at rising social awareness about youth mental health throughout the globe
and encouraging the customers and colleagues to support and advise each other in tough times.
They have also successfully implemented autism aware quiet evenings in their own stores in
order to help families and people who are struggling with weekly shop runs. The hectic
schedules are very difficult for people who have to face autism. These evenings are providing a
sensory and friendly environment with reduced noise, light and priority queuing for such people.
Along with this they are also proudly the biggest supporter of women sports in the country. They
have partnered with LGFA in order to be a part of community and successfully support women
in the community. Along with this they are also distributing surplus food from their warehouses
and stores to different charities (Pine and et. al., 2020). They have donated a number of males by
now and are aiming to donate over 1 million males by 2020.
Employees: Organisation is effectively bringing in the philosophy of all the colleagues
being a similar team. Their major strategies to develop sustainable relationship through
implementing transparent and consistent communication, engaging leaders and also prioritising
the well-being of their stakeholders who are positively contributing to their business objective
successfully. They believe in work safe live well (Maher, 2019). This is taking a holistic view of
all the employees’ health and well-being in the organisation. For LIDL health and well-being
includes physical health, mental health and financial well-being of their employees. They have
successfully encouraged mental health being as a critical aspect in their strategy which is also
supported by their charity partner which has a national Centre for mental health in Ireland. They
have successfully set up themselves as the retailer who is increasing living wage through paying
well to their team members. Living wage refers to measure trade of income and is necessary
considered to meet basic requirements of an individual including housing, clothing, food,
transport and healthcare. It is often seen that this amount is not usually covered in national
minimum wage. Training and support is also provided to employees in order to make sure that
they are reaching to their full capability and potentials in the organisation. There are a number of
managers in organisation who have successfully built their career while working for

organisation. They are provided with on the job training which is giving the employees with an
opportunity to develop further professionally as well as personally.
Social media
In past few years LIDL have successfully realise that they need to make changes in their
marketing plans in order to make sure that they are encouraging customers and also taking part in
community engagement. The company is now becoming more socially aware and customer
centric. They started using hash tags across their advertising and social media which helped in
successfully tracking the progress of their campaigns. The major aim of the campaign they
released was to show that the low-cost products do not always mean low quality. Company
focused on their customers and requested them to share their experience of products and services
through tweets. This was effective to create a powerful user generated content which is often
seen to be more valid and trusted then traditionaladvertising methods. Social media is also
defective it to provide quicker customer service (Durbeej and et. al., 2019). LIDL have also used
the tweet of people as specific product signs in their stores. In order to bring their part in
community engagement LIDL is making sure that they are specifically providing low-cost
product to the consumers of low income group with good quality. They have also carried out
some PR stunt in order to change the consumer views in which they put together a pop-up
restaurant in Stockholm. The PR stunt was effectively successful as the opening night of
restaurant was sold out in just 29 minutes. All the ingredients which are used in the restaurant
abroad from LIDL and internet were used successfully to campaign and create engagement of
society and customers through tweets. After the launch the experience of customers at restaurant
were also shared with the help of tweets which helped in building public relation for LIDL. With
the help of these hashtags and digital media marketing tools LIDL have successfully improve
their market share and increase their community engagement. They are now changing the
perception of customers through using their own personal experience in their marketing material.
Training employees on multiculturalism
It is often seen that employee turnover rate in grocery industry is very high. There is a lot
of cost involved in this turnover which is affecting the customers experience as well as
operational cost of an organisation. The German grocery store chain LIDL is successfully
accelerating its expansion through United States (Mehra, Sikes and Singh, 2020). However it has

now become important for organisation to increase their employs engagement so that they can
effectively increase their reach. It is now required by organisations to attract and retain the best
talent and skills and then train them on multiculturalism. The company is there for offering them
with a number of different benefits and compensation packages which is designed to ensure that
all the employees are recognized well and rewarded for their talent and skill as they are one of
the major stakeholder for business. It is necessary that all employees in the organisation feel that
their contributions are important and they are continuously motivated to grow in their career with
the organisation.
LIDL is successfully training and developing their employees so that they can effectively
deal with any sociocultural issues that are arising in organisation or the society at large. They are
considering all the external factors and building a sustainable business which will help to
increase the bond and relationship between organisation and all the partners in their network.
They have effectively scheduled training programmes for their employs which includes training
on different culture and social issues. Employers are made well aware of their external
environment and how to deal with changes in this environment. Along with this they are
providing a strong appreciation for their workforce and values in order to increase employee
engagement. There is a direct relationship between employee engagement and satisfaction of
customers which proves that organisation needs to make sure that they are effectively training
and developing their employees so that the employee engagement can help in customer
engagement as well. Along with this employee engagement and training and development of
employs will also bring competitive advantage to LIDL (Vafadari and Cooper, 2020). This will
help in increasing their profits, productivity, and retention rate of employees as well as customer
satisfaction rate.
CONCLUSION
With the help of above report it can be concluded that LIDL is suitably position in order
to make sure that they are effectively developing community engagement and their corporate
social responsibility strategy. They are changing their processes with the required patients in
order to make sure that business is growing and meeting all the requirements of society. It is
necessary for them to take into account all the ideas which is provided by employers such as

cutting down black plastic use in their packaging. They have also included a holistic view for
their product life-cycle and shared it with all the producers providing them goods. One more
learning which can be concluded from this report is that all the huge organisations are including
a number of people within it. It is necessary for them to take these initiatives in order to bring
benefits to their employees so that they can breathe clean; it would and also nourish the external
environment. This is an effective way which helps sustainability for the organisation and
continuous growth along with a mindset for a better tomorrow of community. In order to achieve
this it is necessary for organisation to start measuring their impacts and also anticipate the
changes they have brought in society. It is required for them to provide a safe and nurturing
environment to the employees and also positively contribute to all the communities in which they
are operating.

REFRENCES
Books and Journals
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