Finding a place for everyone within hospitality is at the heart of Greene King Training Academy, which includes helping prison leavers find a pathway to a successful career and a second chance at life. Green King’s Chief Communications & Sustainability officer Assad Malic explains why welcoming everyone matters.
Everyone should feel welcome in a pub and the same should be true for having a career in hospitality. At Greene King, our purpose is pouring happiness into lives – that’s the lives of our teams, our customers and the communities we serve. We are really proud to work with people from all backgrounds; refugees, ethnic communities, those with special educational needs, ex-forces and prison leavers, to create a more inclusive and diverse workforce.
We are committed to training and development: we have supported more than 17,000 people on our apprenticeship programme since it was launched in 2011, and we’re committed to reach 20,000 by 2025. We are always looking for new ways to keep growing the programme and we continually add new types of apprenticeships. Currently, we have 37 different apprenticeships and we’ve recently added new opportunities for solicitors and advanced credit control. It’s a misconception that apprenticeship schemes in hospitality are only about the pubs; they can take place in the brewery, support centre and office roles.
Our Untapping Potential report in 2022 was a statement of Greene King’s commitment to recruit and train people from any background to have a successful career in their local pub. We committed to recruiting more prison leavers, providing another talent pool to recruit from, as well as building on the success of our apprenticeship programme and other social mobility schemes.
We want to give back to our communities and, working with the hospitality charity Only A Pavement Away, the prison and probation services’ New Futures Network and Novus, which supports prison leavers to find employment, we launched two prison-based Training Academies – the first at HMP Thameside in London and, in 2023, at HMP Grampian in Aberdeen.
The results have been phenomenal. Since the programme started in 2019, we have recruited 222 prison leavers and are on track to reach 400 by the end of 2025. Over 90% of them have entered back-of-house roles and we’ve seen an excellent retention rate, as they have tended to be focused and hard-working.
Within the prisons, we have set up a replica Greene King kitchen and at Thameside, those on the scheme have been working towards an accredited City & Guilds chef qualification, while those at the Grampian are working towards their SQF, the Scottish equivalent. They are learning how to cook 12 classic dishes from our key menus, using the same ingredients and equipment that they would use in our kitchens. When they leave prison, they have the accreditation and skills to enter a role feeling equipped with the tools they will need. When we speak to them, they say that the scheme has helped them to feel secure about where they’re going next – and we continue to work closely with them as they move forward in the business.
Only A Pavement Away’s stats show that prisoner leavers are 87% less likely to reoffend if they are in employment, compared with the 70% who will reoffend without a job. The length of service for prison leavers who come to work with us ranges from six months to four years. And the programme, called Releasing Potential, provides prison leavers with the confidence and self-esteem to re-enter society and stabilise their lives once they leave custody.
We have a recruitment and screening process and clearly there are thresholds around who can join the programme. But they’re from all walks of life; individuals who finished up in prison for various reasons, often for a small infringement. This programme gives them another chance and hopefully we are giving them the right tools and experience to support them make that important next step, which can be so hard without assistance.
We are currently looking to work with more prisons and we are not a million miles off being able to announce a third. But the reality is that it’s a complex process to set up, and we work very closely with the Ministry of Justice, HM Prison Service and the Scottish Prison Service to ensure we’ve engaged all the stakeholders involved, so that each programme has the best chance of success. It’s something we are absolutely committed to and believe that it is making a valuable contribution to society – and it is also very rewarding.
Military veterans are another group we are working with and who, in today’s world, are so easily overlooked. Yet our experience is that they are diligent, hardworking individuals who have a willingness to learn and an enthusiasm to be part of a team.
Hospitality is suffering from a labour shortage and many younger people are still not viewing the industry as a long-term career option – this is despite 38% of the UK’s workforce having worked in a pub at some point in their lives! So, we are evolving our message to show that working in hospitality is a great place to be: somewhere anyone can build a career and also learn some really valuable, and transferable, life skills.
We’re also working with special education needs (SEN) organisations, such as the Landmarks Specialist College and Mencap, which brings a more diverse workforce into the business, through placements and roles. In 2023, we helped 30 people from SEN backgrounds secure intern placements within the business and 75% of them secured permanent employment in the business.
Much of the work Greene King has been doing over the last three to four years has been about building strong cultural foundations, which means giving people the right tools to do the job. It’s about engaging with people, who traditionally may have joined us for the summer, not for a lifetime, to galvanise them around a single strategic direction. This is about having key values and behaviours in place to help everyone do their job, with policies that recognise and support gender identity, menopause, maternity and more, all with a strong code of conduct to show what we expect of them and what they can expect of us as an employer. We are thinking hard about how to drive diversity, from female representation at leadership team level, to more people from LGBTQ+, black, Asian, ethnic minorities and disabled communities.
We are all on a journey to build greater trust with our team members and I’m pleased to say that technology is helping to provide a better view, as it allows individuals to tell us about who they are. And we’re making good progress on our commitment to double the representation of black and Asian and minority ethnic team members within the company by 2030.
We want our pubs to be welcoming to everyone, particularly in what is a rapidly changing and diverse country. Look at the figures: 18% of our population is now black, Asian and minority ethnic. Our population is changing and so is the role of our pubs.
I’m Pakistani and I come from a family that doesn’t drink alcohol – my mum almost fell off her chair when I said I was coming to work for Greene King. But I see my role as being able to show people what pubs are about, which is bringing people together in a place where everyone can be themselves – and my mum is recognising the diversity of people in pubs and that they’re not just about alcohol, but socialising and community engagement.
Throughout history, pubs have been brilliant at evolving and they are the only constant on the high street, as the banks and other retailers have come and gone.
But in this challenging environment, with the cost of business increasing and the number of pubs decreasing, we must continue to ask Government to lower the cost of doing business, so that we can all continue to invest in our teams and keep investing in more training and staff retention schemes.
Pubs are the original social network, and when a pub closes that is challenging for the community. COVID showed us what an amazing force for good pubs are, especially for the elderly, lonely and vulnerable, and how much they do for charity. The challenge is when we are doing so much, it can be hard to keep everything moving forward at pace, but we do, and that’s testament to our pub teams who are dedicatedly pouring happiness into lives.
