How a celebrity chef’s restaurant chain earned loyalty through L&D
You’d never ordinarily notice the nondescript khaki-coloured door at the back of the dining room at Jamie Oliver’s flagship Jamie’s Italian restaurant, just off Piccadilly Circus in London. It looks like a fire exit but, in fact, it leads – via a series of twisting corridors and flights of stairs – into the heart of the HR department.
If that means constant temptation for Stacy O’Hagan, head of people and development, to pop down for a plate of antipasti, she isn’t saying. But the portal is symbolic as well as practical: now in her fifth year with the restaurant group, O’Hagan is determined HR and L&D should be a seamless part of the business.
The group encompasses 36 Jamie’s Italians across the country as well as four other sites including Barbecoa, opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. With almost 3,000 staff, the sheer logistics of building the business to become one of the best-known high street restaurant chains is daunting, but O’Hagan has found time to question common wisdom about the way HR should operate, including where HR talent comes from.
A number of the HR and L&D team began their careers in the restaurants, in one case as a waitress. “They really get it because they have run restaurants themselves,” says O’Hagan. “I look for people who are intuitive and have a high level of empathy. Working in hospitality is difficult – it’s long hours and a lot of pressure, and you won’t get that unless you have worked in that environment.”
Transitioning from the shop floor to the more sedate confines of HR can be difficult – “Sometimes in the restaurants it can be a bit hierarchical and military. You get the stripes, you move up the ranks… to go from that kind of culture to this team environment is very different” – but in many ways, says O’Hagan, it is easier to teach HR smarts than to initiate a ‘typical’ HR person into the heady world of hospitality.
New HR hires go through a condensed version of the six-week academy programme all new managers and chefs take part in. But even so, says O’Hagan: “I have to teach them how to communicate with restaurant people because they are unique, particularly the chefs. You have to be as far from typical HR as possible, otherwise people just aren’t interested. We always say with our language ‘is it Jamie enough?’ We make sure every bit of communication, whether written or verbal, is non-corporate and can be understood by our staff, without sounding patronising.”
This integration of HR and restaurant employees will continue apace; already, most of the business’s people advisors spend three days a week on the road, and O’Hagan says she wants the business to move towards a more formalised HR business partner model. But she sees innovation in learning as the other key pillar of the group’s success. While there are a number of flagship programmes – 400 of the most senior staff have the opportunity to study for a CMI qualification – O’Hagan is aware not everyone requires such formality.
That’s why the core offer is supplemented by experiential learning opportunities, such as a ‘de-stress your mind’ course in which participants are taught self-hypnosis techniques. On ‘foodspiration’ days, head chefs show more junior chefs and waiting staff how to prepare non-Italian food (“Working with pasta and antipasti every single day, sometimes it gets a bit samey,” says O’Hagan) and a range of cultural days remind employees of the business’s roots and have featured live Skype presentations from Oliver.
Most intriguingly, the team has set up ‘hotlines’ where internal experts are made available for three or four hours, to answer phoned-in questions on topics from IT skills and operational issues to management and motivational queries. It recognises that some courses may be too general to meet very specific needs, and that some key staff are simply too busy to take a day out.
It all matters because development opportunities are what keep people in the business, says O’Hagan. It’s why she insisted on not having HR in her job title, and why the company is investing heavily in learning: “We’ve always been very good at developing our staff, but it’s always been in a very organic way because we’ve always been opening so many restaurants. People were constantly moving around and getting promoted. But our strategy has shifted so there are fewer new sites opening. We needed to invest in giving people opportunities to learn and develop that don’t just involve moving to a new site or role.”
The growing war for talent in the sector plays its part, too: “Every week it seems there’s a new brand popping up that’s really interesting and cutting edge. They are keeping us on our toes. It used to be the case a few years back that we were the sexiest high street restaurant out there, but now there’s so much choice. We really have to work hard to attract people to us in the first place. We do that by shouting about all the L&D we do. And we then have to work hard to hold on to them, to say ‘stay another year with us, we’ll put you through a qualification or we’ll send you to an international [restaurant] opening’.”
The overall aim is for every employee to experience learning – in 2014, every manager and senior chef undertook a formal course, while many of the other staff (who tend to be more transient, particularly in London) – benefited from one of the ‘softer’ opportunities. Every staff member can see a visually mapped route to promotion, says O’Hagan, and the learning begins in the first five shifts, when they are shadowed and formally tested on the brand and key processes. “We talk about learning from the very first interviews, during inductions, probationary reviews and appraisals. It’s constantly out there.”
And while the pace of recruitment may have slowed a little, the business continues to invest heavily in building networks of top talent and using social media for both volume and more specialist recruitment. But at least one thing has changed, says O’Hagan: “People know now that they’re not going to come here and work alongside Jamie every day. I think in the beginning, they were a bit confused about that…”