The cultural shift project was coming along nicely for Elsey and her team, and the firm was excited to introduce its new approach to staff. The month was February 2020. Weeks later, the UK’s first ever lockdown was announced, shuttering businesses around the world. Greene King, just like its rivals in the hospitality and leisure sectors, suddenly faced an uncertain future.

“We all stopped, took a deep breath and thought ‘what is this going to do to us? How is this going to affect our cultural transformation?’” Elsey said, adding: “We had a roadmap in place for the things we’d been planning to do, and we'd planned a big conference (to announce them). On reflection, what it did was enable us to make great decisions during that early pandemic period. We set ourselves up for the next year and a half, whereby we anchored ourselves in making decisions based on our values.”

It was those cultural values that came into practice in the summer of 2020, when the UK Government announced that pubs in England would be allowed to reopen for the first time since the start of the lockdown. The date, July 4, was quickly dubbed ‘Super Saturday’ by the national media. Not surprisingly, Greene King’s leadership began preparing for what would be an important day for the business. But reopening thousands of locations couldn’t possibly be done without discussing a plan of action with their pub runners. Ultimately, they made a huge decision; one which came as a surprise to many, after taking onboard their feedback.

Sticking to the roadmap

Given how quickly things were changing for businesses during the pandemic, HR leaders would have easily been forgiven for letting certain aspects of their workplace – a focus on culture among them – falling by the wayside. At Greene King, it was quite the contrary, as Elsey explained: “I don’t feel like we ever waned from our roadmap. We were all sitting around trying to figure out what furlough meant and how we were meant to use it. It is difficult when you’re trying to make decisions based on things that you don’t really understand well, and the unknown, we’d never been in a situation like this where so much was unknown. We had to make some choices based on a hunch, because that was all we had.

“There was so much going on at that time, but I think because we’d done this plan so close to the pandemic that it was really fresh in our minds and we could remember how we felt on the days we were talking to staff about it. It was a good reminder of how, if we were going to make a decision, had we thought about it in regards to our culture and values? We were lucky, I guess, to be able to have that bringing us back.”

The cultural change continues, post-lockdown

A focus on these values appeared to influence much of Greene King’s decision-making in the peak of the pandemic. But the firm is not resting on its laurels.

Last October, Greene King finally had the opportunity to bring its management population together, around 2,000 people at the NEC. Elsey said that the congregation was “one of those moments where, having come through the pandemic and being on the other end, having all those people together and talking about the future of Greene King, was really exciting.”

The company also launched new performance metrics, known informally within the company as ‘the dartboard’. The aim was to bring about a culture shift among management, shifting their focus from basing good performance on a small subset of criteria (such as financial results) and looking at a more rounded range of KPIs. There are five segments of the board looking at the business in a really rounded way - people, pride, customer, finance and ops excellence.

“Those are really now the anchor of our business performance. We don’t look at any of them individually, we look at them as a whole. We’ve shifted people from thinking all about the bottom line, and I think that helped us in creating the right environment for our people and our customers - the end result being therefore a great financial performance,” said Elsey.

This year the company has taken about 2,500 people through a leadership development programme, a scheme which Elsey revealed has a focus on helping the participants with the tools they need to embed and underline the culture. The firm also recently expressed a commitment to taking on 5,000 new apprentices by 2025, building on the 15,000 it has already supported since 2011.

Even now, more than a year after England ended its Covid-19 restrictions which had crippled the hospitality sector, many firms in this industry are still suffering from talent shortages. According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 83% more vacancies in this sector between March and May 2022 than there were in the same timeframe of 2019. This war for talent means businesses like Greene King must do whatever they can to showcase themselves as the best place to work. Promoting a positive workplace culture is one of the strongest ways - in fact a Robert Walters’ 'Cultural Fit' whitepaper recently found that 87% of employers offer an induction to new staff on company culture and values. The same report found that over half of Millennials reported that poor company culture was a source of disappointment in a new job – emphasising just how important this issue is to the recruitment process.

Setting up for success

By openly reflecting on its own approach to workplace culture, and subsequently implementing changes which remain in place to this day, Greene King has set itself up as a strong case study of how an employer can shift its values to being simultaneously employee and customer-led. Using its newly-created values to guide its decision making, and acting directly on staff feedback in certain situations, has laid the groundwork for the future of Greene King’s company culture, ensuring that these purposes and values will benefit all aspects of the business, from the current workforce to future generations of employees.