Five minutes with: Kathryn Austin, People & Marketing Director for Pizza Hut Restaurants

Kathryn Austin, People & Marketing Director for Pizza Hut Restaurants, discusses the current challenges in HR.

What are the unique HR challenges you currently face? How will you overcome these?

It’s more of an opportunity than a challenge. The business is currently undergoing a major transformation process that has cost £50million so far. We are taking the business through a change where the team will undergo 21 weeks of intensive development. So from a HR perspective, we’re taking over 8,000 employees through a complete capability transformation. It’s fantastic but it takes a lot of management, sequencing and being hands-on with the business.

Pizza Hut was recently voted the second best bar or eatery to work for. How do you keep employee engagement ratings so high? What advice on this would you give to other HR departments?