"Hospitality is the "Power of Human Connection" - Dame Karen Jones

Inspiring words from Dame Karen Jones, chair of both the Hawksmoor and Mowgli restaurant chains, senior independent director at Deliveroo and who founded casual dining chain Café Rouge in 1989. During the Pandemic, she worked closely with ministers and was the only hospitality representative on the government's Build Back Better business council. She was made a dame in the Queen's Birthday Honours List 2022 for her services to business and the hospitality industry.

People are at the heart of every hospitality business.

Karen Jones spoke at the Propel Hospitality Talent & Training Conference on Tuesday she said:

Hospitality is the lynch pin of society. We realised how much we missed it during lock down.

She reminded us that the holy grail of hospitality is:

The power of the moment of human connection that keeps your customers coming back again and again.

When asked about what attracted her to working in hospitality she said it was the

• Excitement hospitality can give

• The pleasure of looking after people

• Lovely colleagues who are fun, high energy, innovative and entrepreneurial

She went on to talk about that elusive "hospitality gene" found in people who just get the excitement and buzz of hospitality and love the pleasure of looking after people. The million dollar question is: is the hospitality gene innate or can you teach it? Karen Jones believes that you can. An employer needs to explain what hospitality is all about - the hard technical skills and soft communication skills can be learned later.

The Importance of Culture

Culture is hard to define she said, it’s more complex than “your people just doing the right things when people are looking.”

Culture is that feeling it gives you.

She defined CULTURE as the 'feeling it gives you' built on 4 pillars:

1. Being clear about the culture you want to create and knowing and communicating your values.

2. Genuinely caring about your people. Remember everyone is different: different backgrounds, different outlooks and with different ambitions. Culture is about trying to weld them into a whole through daily decisions that strengthen not weaken the culture.

3. Not expecting people to do things in their work life that they wouldn’t do in their personal life

4. Always delivering on what you say you will.

How to define your Values to build Culture

Karen Jones emphasised that your values have to be what you genuinely believe in. Values should be driven by the business founders or leaders, not outsourced to a consultant. Create a Mission and Vision statement that communicates your purpose and values. This is the time for leaders to be quite direct - your team need something to hang their hat on.

Keep your values simple and easy to articulate. If you can't remember them or say them clearly, they're too long and complicated. Use the one-sentence test! Can you say what you stand for in one simple sentence?

You know your values have caught fire when people start using them and talking about them. Then they start to drive behaviours.

4 Crucial Factors to Retaining Employees

Building on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Karen Jones identified four blocks to retention, without these things you will never get people to stay in your business.

1. PAY - You can’t do a good job if you are worrying about how you are going to pay the rent.

2. SAFETY & SECURITY - If I do well will I be secure?

3. WORK LIFE BALANCE - long hours and low pay are the worst things. Our cognitive ability is affected by stress and the main causes of stress are fair pay and scheduling.

4. CAREER ADVANCEMENT - how do I get my foot on the next rung of the ladder?

How does Hospitality improve diversity, inclusion and equality?

Asma Khan, owner of Darjeeling Express and star of Netflix’s Chef’s Table, has written widely about her experience of starting her restaurant. She says she believed it would never be possible to run a business in a world that she described as "an all white, all male club." She said, if she had a daughter, she would seriously discourage her from a career in hospitality, where kitchens are all too often "a toxic testosterone-fuelled environment."

This last point obviously resonated strongly for me after my then 17-year old daughter announced that she wanted to be a chef. We talked seriously about what a tough career choice that was, especially for woman. We talked about how life as a chef almost completely incompatible with being a mother and how the majority of kitchens remain a very male and macho environment. Needless to say, like all good teenagers, she listened to my advice and chose to ignore me!

At the Propel Hospitality Talent and Training Conference in London on Tuesday 3 October, Asma Khan moved me to tears as she spoke, as she has done before when talking about her incredible work establishing a cafe in a refugee camp in northern Iraq employing traumatised Yazidi women.

This time she spoke about how she still feels like an outsider in the world of hospitality, but she’s learned to see it as an advantage. She talked about how food not only has the power to bring us together, but is also a cause of division. She said in India “Food is main way people are divided” by religion and caste. At her restaurant Khan employs women from all backgrounds, religions and ages and abilities. Everyone is welcome and everyone is equal “We put our religion and our caste at the door, we celebrate every festival. We are a team.

A diverse team gives you strength

Asma Khan believes that you strengthen your team by having a diverse team and urged all businesses build a diverse workplace.

Hiring a diverse team is key to inspiring the next generation in hospitality.

Her advice:

• Understand you are a team

• Be empathetic and let people know that they matter

• Offer flexible work and reduce the hours

Darjeeling Express is a model of what a diverse workplace can be.

However, the reality of diversity in the hospitality sector is different as demonstrated by Be Inclusive Hospitality's 2023 Inside Hospitality Report , a comprehensive account of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in hospitality through a race lens and whic includes 3,120 views and experiences captured encompass all backgrounds, genders, ages, jobs, and lengths of service.

The report says 1 in 3 respondents report personal experiences of discrimination at work and that only 16% of hospitality workers believe it’s an inclusive and diverse industry.

I was honoured to host a crucial discussion in The Restaurant Show with:

• Lorraine Copes Be Inclusive Hospitality award-winning social entrepreneur, hospitality consultant and life coach. Lorraine has two decades as an executive director for brands including Gordon Ramsay Restaurants and Corbin & King, but felt compelled to form Be Inclusive Hospitality CIC in 2020 due to the consistent lack of representation of people of colour in positions of influence and the supply chain. This social enterprise now holds the prime position of igniting much-needed conversations and delivering initiatives to advance change within the hospitality, food, and drink sectors.

• Mecca Ibrahim co-founder of Women In The Food Industry, a Community Interest Company for conversation, insight, stories, resources & community support as women in food face obstacles of inequality & inclusion.

• Chris Todd Head of Talent JKS Restaurants a former chef who now oversees all recruitment and talent initiatives across JKS’s portfolio of 22 restaurants including Trishna, Gymkhana, Kitchen Table, Sabor and Lyle’s; Hoppers, BAO, Brigadiers.

We agreed that more needs to be done to change the perception of working in Hospitality. The sector has improved but we need to blow our own trumpet more to shout over the stereotypes portrayed in TV shows like Boiling Point and The Bear. Education is key. We need to get young children interested in food and hospitality and work with parents, schools and colleges to show it’s an amazing career for life, not just a stop-gap.

Who wants to work in hospitality? Debate at the Abergavenny Food Festival

The hospitality sector employs around 10% of the UK workforce, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Yet it’s not news that hospitality is facing a recruitment crisis and roles like chefs, remain challenging to fill which is restricting businesses from operating at anywhere near their full capacity.

• 61% of hospitality businesses are experiencing staff shortages and widely reduced their trading hours and days as a result. UKHospitality, the industry body estimates that vacancies are costing businesses £21bn in unmet demand and lost revenue.

• ONS figures announced August vacancies in accommodation and food service activities fell for the fourth month in a row, to 127,000 - but still significantly higher than before the pandemic

• British workers make up just over half of the workforce while staff from outside the UK have historically made up more than 40 per cent of the hospitality workforce - but we’ve lost nearly 200,000 international workers since the end of 2019.

• Research from August / September 2022 of pubs/restaurants and hotels saw more people leaving the sector than during COVID-19.

Any successful hospitality business's most valuable asset is a committed team - so recruitment and retention are vital.

On 16th September, I hosted a fascinating panel discussion to a packed-out audience at Abergavenny Food Festival to discuss how to recruit and retain staff in hospitality.

We had fantastic contributions and different perspectives from brilliant panellists:

• Jeremy Lee, Chef Owner of Soho institution Quo Vadis;

• Pervin Todiwala co-owner of Café Spice Namaste which she founded with her husband Cyrus.

• Murf - Anthony Murphy co-founder of The Beefy Boys which started as a hobby with four friends winning the best burger in the world before opening their first restaurant in Hereford, then Shrewsbury and if you’ve seen Tom Kerridge’s brilliant series Hidden World of Hospitality - opened in Cheltenham earlier this year.

• David Chapman Director for Wales from UKHospitality. He is a champion of the sector, and regularly lobbies government and provides advice and guidance.

We explored the idea that in other countries, hospitality is seen as a prestigious career for life, a skilled job which is respected and well-rewarded. Yet, in this country, there is a deeply ingrained belief that hospitality is not a viable career. This perception is fuelled by media portrayals of shouty chefs like Gordan Ramsey, high-stress workplaces in The Bear and a hotbed of mental health issues and addiction as seen in Boiling Point.

One thing is clear: hospitality can offer a fantastic career, full of brilliant people but it’s tough.

Perspectives of the industry need to shift, and leadership behaviours and expectations of staff need to change. Sure, they are slowly, but there’s some way to go. It’s an immensely complex subject: we touched on Tronc/tips, VAT, Brexit and education- huge subjects in themselves. We could have talked all day.

25 Years of the Abergavenny Food Festival

This year Abergavenny Food Festival celebrated its 25th year. I think that I’ve been to at least 15 of those years!

It is always the highlight of my year, discovering wonderful new food and drink producers, tasting and enjoying amazing food, seeing old friends and making new friends every year. The Festisval is not just an excuse for a party though, at its heart it remains true to the ethos on which it was founded which is to celebrate the local food economy and to raise awareness of crucial themes around food from sustainability and the environment, food education, and eating for health.

The spirit of the Abergavenny Food Festival was captured in this brilliant BBC Radio 4 Food Programme “Abergavenny at 25” first broadcast on 25 September and available to listen to on BBC Sounds.

Hospitality Mavericks Podcast interview

I’ve long been a fan of the podcast Hospitality Mavericks, so I was really excited to be asked by its host Michael Tingsager, to join him to chat about my work as an executive coach and running leadership development programmes.

We talk about the difference between leadership and management, how to build a strong, happy and engaged team, changing expectations of work life and just some of the challenges facing business leaders today.

I also share my own story of how I moved from hospitality and food & drink branding and communications to become a business coach, and how I build healthy routines and lots of exercise to look after myself.

You can listen to the podcast on all the usual podcast channels from Spotify, Apple, Google, Amazon and below on YouTube.

I highly recommend all the podcasts on Hospitality Mavericks!

Find them all here: Hospitality Mavericks >

Speaking and Hosting at the Theatre of Food, Latitude Festival

Polly Robinson speaking at Latitude Festival.

When you’re invited to speak at one of the UK’s favourite Festival - Latitude - it would be rude to say no! In July I took part in a panel discussion at Latitude’s Theatre of Food and hosted demonstrations from chefs from across the UK.

Latitude’s Theatre of Food curated by FoodHaus Productions was new in 2018 and swiftly became a hugely popular part of the festival’s programme with cookery demonstrations and panel discussions from chefs, food writers and campaigners including the team from Sustain and the Real Bread Campaign.

I was honoured to be invited to take part in a panel discussion about the food and drink of East Anglia and the chance to talk about issues close to my heart. I also hosted sessions with chef Richard Bainbridge from Benedicts in Norwich, Georgina Hayden and a brilliant cooking on fire demo from the fabulous Lord Logs - aka Mark Parr of the London Log Company and his partner cookery writer and stylist Natalie Seldon, Pretty Edible Stylist. I also hosted a Q&A with one of my absolute favourite Suffolk food producers, Jonathan Crickmore of the Fen Farm Dairy, producers of Baron Bigod - to one of the biggest audiences of the weekend keen to taste the incredible cheese, butter and raw milk.

It was brilliant to see such huge audience for these demos especially when there’s so much going on at the festival all weekend and it demonstrates the genuine growing interest in learning about food from people of all ages and walks of life.

Polly Robinson is available for talks, panels and to host workshops and demonstrations. Please get in touch.