Infrastructure — People

We believe our people are core to enabling our aggressive growth plans to be realised. Colleagues continue to play an important role in delivering our plans to sustain our success as a retailer and build momentum across a challenging retail landscape.

To succeed it is important that we build and maintain both a qualified core and flexible colleague base. Improvements in colleague work patterns have optimised shop floor availability of the right people at the right time to improve customer experience and deliver on the Halfords "helpful" promise.

In addition, we continue to provide a range of training and development opportunities designed to improve productivity levels within Halfords Autocentres and improve competency in fitting services across the Halfords store portfolio. This we believe will drive growth.

Our people continue to play an important role in ensuring Halfords is recognised as being a "Friend to the Motorist", the "Best Cycle Shop in Town", as well as a "Starting Point for Great Getaways".

Strengthening Our Team

We continue to strengthen our team at all levels and across all areas of the business. We focus on recruiting for attitude, expertise and potential as well as the ability to be part of a cohesive and unified "one" team approach.

Our appointments range from strategic hires, as well as further additions to our operational management teams and specialist retail trading, digital marketing, search analysis and analytics teams. Such appointments continue to inform and identify new buying and trading strategies.

Experienced

Our colleagues are highly experienced in the roles they perform. In particular, not only do our people have great experience in product knowledge, servicing and fitting but our buyers are highly experienced in the markets we source from and supply to. In addition, our property team has considerable experience in converting and refurbishing our store portfolio. All of this experience contributes to making Halfords a retailer of choice.

Engagement

To be the best we have to engage with our colleagues. Our people are encouraged to connect, collaborate and exchange ideas, knowledge and insights. This informs decision-making and improves our overall customer proposition.

Engagement includes clear communication focused around our core values — Think Customer; Be Helpful; Earn Trust; Inspire Others; Aim To Win; Work As A Team.

Examples of engagement across the business include the initiative to encourage colleagues within the Centre and at the Distribution Centres to "Buddy" or "Adopt" a store — this has proved a great way to get people thinking across the business rather than simply seeing things from their perspective. In turn, this has led to improving our multi-channel offerings.

Competencies

There are a number of activities that we believe are essential to ensuring that we remain competitive in the market and attractive to our customers.

Core competencies in marketing, branding, store retailing, distribution and international sourcing ensure we can provide customer offerings across a range of price points. Done well, these competencies allow us to maintain and improve our margins as well as grow our revenues.

Competencies help to shape the business and have led to a focus on "Operational Specialisation" and having a "Least Cost Back Office".

Values Driven

Developing performance and living the Group values of being helpful depends on having trustworthy, honest, well-trained, enthusiastic and knowledgeable people who are capable of delivering the plan and living our values.

Creating the right culture is all about "the way we do things at Halfords" — the way we behave and the values we live and work by. We believe it is essential that our people feel engaged, understand their responsibilities and are held accountable for their actions.

Creating the right mind-set ensures that customers have a great experience — spending more and returning to Halfords again and again. We think it is important to celebrate great performance and to never accept poor performance. This requires talented and passionate people involved in both frontline service as well as those who work behind the scenes.

Development

We have undertaken a number of people-based initiatives to improve Group performance, develop a greater commercial focus and drive sustainable growth through the development of innovative customer offerings. This involves developing capability across our stores, autocentres, distribution centres as well as Head Office.

Innovation — whether product or process led — is driven by participation, engagement and team effort. This allows us to differentiate ourselves in a crowded marketplace.

Right from the start, we induct and train for great customer service. Training ranges from a competency framework across the business to nationally recognised and accredited training programmes for store and Halfords Autocentre colleagues.