It may sound a bit clichéd, but one of Fuller’s greatest strengths is in it being a family business. We’ve always invested in our people and when we emerged from the pandemic, we were lucky to have managed to retain our talent. People tell us they stay because they like the family culture and working environment, and that has been my experience also, since I started working for Fuller’s 12 years ago.
But like every business in hospitality, we have felt the pressure that has come from the recruitment crisis and, post-Covid, we have looked at how we could do more to keep our talent in the business. As a result, we have increased the benefits package, with the most popular benefit being our staff discount card, which is now linked to loyalty, so that the longer someone remains in the business, the bigger the discount becomes.
Team members receive their discount card after four weeks in the job, with the percentage of discount growing after one, three and five years. When someone has been in the business for five years they receive a glitzy gold card that gives them 40% discount on food and drink in our managed pubs and hotels.
We’ve also made it easier for our people to feed back to us – and we’re listening.
It’s something that has delivered massive benefits. We ask our team members questions like ‘what do you really want from Fuller’s?’ and we also have our annual Happiness Index along with forums with our General Managers and Head Chefs, which are in-person sessions to hear what they have to say. There is also MyVoice, which is an online platform
where people can leave comments, anonymously, 24-hours a day, seven days a week. Comments received have been on everything from they don’t like a uniform change to how they’re feeling. If they’ve had a really bad day, they say it helps to write it down and share it. Equally, they leave messages saying ‘we smashed it today!’. We literally get hundreds of comments every month.
Listening to our teams has also revealed that one of the critical factors in whether someone stays or leaves the business is their leader. Many of our team leaders are very experienced, but they might come from different generations from the teams they are leading. Generation Z and Alphas need different things, so we have created an essential leadership training programme called Lead Your Way, which focuses on what it means to be a great leader. All 180 of our pub General Managers are currently on the scheme, with 180 Head Chefs to follow, and then 100 people in support office roles.
The first module is all about self and our leaders are put through a challenging 360-degree process, as they learn about themselves. They will talk about generational and inclusive leadership too, and the feedback so far from the GMs is that they are loving it. They say it’s challenging but they’re getting a lot of value from it. It will be especially interesting to see the feedback from our Head Chefs, when they start the programme next. Chefs can get promoted for being great chefs and not because they’re good leaders. In fact, many of them will not have had any leadership development and this is something that we know has to change.
This programme isn’t about the retention of our leadership team, although we hope it will make them want to stay longer in the business, but it’s about the performance and development of their team members. People work for people, and people want to work for great leaders. Great leaders have great teams, which equates to great business performance. This is especially true within hospitality, where we know that good teams will take great care of their customers.
Another area we have tackled is our older workforce. Post-pandemic, we noticed that the number of older workers had dropped off. While this was in line with what had been happening on a national scale, with fewer over-50s in the workplace, it was something we didn’t feel comfortable with. In light of this, we started a piece of work that promoted why Fuller’s was a great place to be if you’re over 50, in partnership with Rest Less, an online community for the over-50s. Since then, we have been getting four times as many job applications from the over-50s than
before, and have 100 more over-50s currently employed in the business.
Like everyone in the industry, we have had to widen the pool, in terms of finding new staff. It’s no longer the case that we have ready-made team members walking through the door in answer to a job ad. This has presented a challenge
for our GMs, who are finding fewer and fewer people looking for jobs with experience, so we’re being more creative about the people we’re hiring. But hiring the personality and training the skill does present a challenge for our GMs – and this is where we find that having a broad age range of team members really helps. Our over-50s have that life experience and are able to put their arms around the younger team members and support them.
We have heavily invested in apprenticeships too and we are seeing the rewards in the creation of a chef pipeline. Our apprenticeship journey has highlighted some lovely individual stories, like Beth, who started a law degree and hated it, and now she’s a chef apprentice and flourishing. And Julie, who had been a school teacher and was looking
for a second career when she joined The Ship in Langstone, Hampshire. When Julie relocated to Stratford-Upon-Avon, she moved to another Fuller’s pub – she is brilliant and exudes passion and energy.
Hospitality has a place for everyone and this is a message we want to get out there.
If you don’t want to be a head chef, you can be a service coach or a wine champion. There is a place for you whether you want to work five or 40 hours a week. And there are opportunities to develop once you’re in the business: take our GM at The White Swan in Stratford, who started with the company as a housekeeper. We’re proud to say that 63% of our GMs are home-grown.
The challenge for hospitality, when times are tough and every business is struggling with margins, is that it becomes really easy to say you won’t spend money on training and developing people. But that’s a shortterm view, because if collectively we don’t develop people now, where will the leaders of the future come from?
Our strong family values create a positive culture for our team members and we will continue to look at ways to create more opportunities for more people, and make positive change where we know we can make a difference, including actively recruiting over-50s and people with intellectual disabilities. When it comes to the Diversity & Inclusion agenda, we recognise we can’t do everything but we can do a few things really well. If everyone does the same, collectively we will create change.
For us, listening to our teams has become fundamental to what we’re doing – although I would add that with listening comes the challenge of delivering on those suggestions. But by involving our teams and leaders more, we are also finding that they often have the best answers and are best placed to help find the solutions.
