Speaking on the topic of ‘driving employee engagement during double digit growth’, at the HR Forum on board the cruise ship Aurora yesterday morning, Carpenter, whose organisation has grown from five coffee shops in 1997 to 434 at the end of 2010, said: “We want to keep a small business feel as we get larger. We are reliant on 3,000 employees to deliver great coffee to our customers every time – and we would lose this if they weren’t engaged.
“There is no secret to good engagement. We just keep a focus on it. Our view is that we are a people business serving coffee, not a coffee business serving people and we constantly communicate this with staff. Even when times are tough, our people sit high on the boardroom agenda.”
Loyalty and cultural fit of staff are key elements of Caffè Nero’s strategy and this starts during the recruitment process. The firm is keen to hire people based on their attitudes, rather than their skills, so they are stretched and challenged as they learn their roles.
“In business, a member of staff who doesn’t fit our culture is more damaging than a low-skilled employee,” said Carpenter. “We can fill capability gaps, but we can’t change attitudes.”
The company ensures managers are invited to head office to personally meet the board; they are invited for ‘bitch and whinge’ sessions to put forward difficulties to the CEO; and area managers make themselves known to all employees. The company actively seeks to promote staff from within rather than recruit externally.
Carpenter has implemented a ‘strategic recognition’ scheme, to make staff feel uniquely special. This includes asking customers to name staff who have been especially helpful and when this is done it is announced in the internal magazine; area managers are encouraged to personally thank the employee.
And the ‘no silver bullet’ initiative is paying off for Carpenter. In 2001, Caffè Nero had 427 staff and this has increased to in excess of 3,000, while sales revenue for 2010 came in at £153.6 million. Staff engagement has increased alongside. The company has recently implemented engagement surveys and found 87% of employees feel proud to work for Caffè Nero.
In 2010, retail research group Allegra Strategies conducted a survey of the most admired food and drink brands in the UK and rated Caffè Nero in the top five, with McDonalds and Innocent Drinks.