Building brands through kindness

Anya Davis, Baringa:

Does employee welfare and happiness lead to increased productivity and profit? I'm here with Catherine Allen from Ella’s Kitchen to discuss this question. She's Head of Keeping People Happy. And with a title like that, I'm keen to explore her views and her thoughts, particularly preventing loneliness at work. So, hello Catherine. So kindness and happiness, there must be a correlation between the two... What does corporate kindness mean to you and how does it create happiness?

Catherine Allen, Ella's Kitchen:

I think corporate kindness is probably not so very different from normal kindness, really. All the kind of behaviours that make us thrive. So somebody who acknowledges you, cares about you, listens to you, treats you with respect. I think there all qualities that translate into corporate kindness as much as interpersonal kindness.

But I think there are probably some other things that employers can do to be particularly kind to people.  And I feel those are things like nurturing people. So giving people the tools and the support to be able to reach their full development potential, for example. So to me it's very much about how do we treat each other at work, both the team that we work with directly and also our external partners as well.

Anya Davis, Baringa:

I'd love to understand your job title. When I heard I'd be speaking with the head of keeping people Happy I was like “that is the best job title in the world”. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about your role. And I guess, how does that differentiate between sort of traditional head of HR or head of people?

Catherine Allen, Ella's Kitchen:

I think one of the things we try do at Ella’s is we all have quite interesting job titles. The reason for that is that we're a children's food business, so we always try and see things through the eyes of the child. So we describe things the way that a child would describe a role. So I guess that's where the slight quirkiness of the term itself came from.  

What's my job? It's to keep people happy, fundamentally. So I think it marks a slight sort of step difference from human resources, so you're just a number on a piece of paper to treating you like an individual with feelings and thinking about how you will best thrive in this environment.

Anya Davis, Baringa:

I guess that's kind of one of the important aspects of B Corp. It would be interesting just to hear a little bit more about your perspective on looking after your people and what that means for Ella’s kitchen.

Catherine Allen, Ella's Kitchen:

Yeah, so we were quite early adopters of B Corp, so we’ve been accredited for quite a few years now, we were one of the first UK businesses. But we really felt this was a way of holding ourselves to account and setting a really high standard for how we work as a business. So they were all things that resonated anyway. But we felt this accreditation really meant that we could be clear about where we were and where we needed to improve. So it's been great actually as a way of just thinking strategically, where do we need to focus our efforts? So I think lots of sort of overlaps between being a good employer, an employer that acts with kindness and the B Corp credentials as well.

Anya Davis, Baringa:

From Ella’s kitchen point of view around being good to each other. I'd love to explore what that means to you as a as an organisation.

Catherine Allen, Ella's Kitchen:

We have five values and one of them is be good to each other, We're good to each other is the name of the value. So again, it was how do we describe how we behave in this childlike way? So we kept it very simple. But in terms of the definition, what that is about, is about being truthful, sincere, honest, giving constructive feedback, talking to each other in a really good way, so in a positive way.  

And I think really importantly, the final sort of phrase in it is put yourself in other people's shoes, which I think is quite a cornerstone of kindness, just to imagine how somebody else might feel in the same situation. I think we need to sort of move away from thinking that kindness is just about niceness all the time.  So just move away from it's always about niceness because I don't think it is quite the same thing.

Anya Davis, Baringa:

Yeah, I completely agree. How does kindness play through some of those difficult decisions you might have made?

Catherine Allen, Ella's Kitchen:

I'll just mention a couple of sort of difficult times for us really as well, because I think that's relevant to this all. Our managing director unfortunately passed away three years ago, which was a terrible shock to everybody. She was quite young. How do you look after her family really well? How do you do the team on how the family is doing?  How do you commemorate her passing? So we built a garden in memory of her, she’s a very keen gardener. And we set up a mentoring scheme.

She was a working mum who really liked to help other working mums, so we set up a scheme helping working mums outside Ella’s, so that as an example. I think Covid is a really good example and I'm sure you'll have come across organisations that maybe didn't handle it quite so well.  

So we have about 50% of our team who are parents of children and we knew the schools were shut and this was going to be a nightmare. So we immediately said to the team, put your family first. You will need to spend time with your children. So just tell us when you can work and we will work around it and everybody will pitch in.  We will sort of cover off what we need to cover off. We will make decisions about what we can't do in order to make this work. And we will pay you in full for as long as it takes. And that seems like such a simple, obvious thing looking back at it. But at the time I know there were other organisations saying, We'll just pay for the work that you do.  If you need to look after your kids, you work two days a week and that's what we pay you for. So we just had a very different attitude to it and we were also thoughtful about what people needed.

So what about people living on their own? For example, What about the parents who are tearing their hair out trying to deal with this?  So we set up lots of kind of little clubs and support groups so that people could get together at events and actually two the people that joined the “I live on my own” group are getting married later on this year. So yeah, it obviously works.

Anya Davis, Baringa:

You touched a little bit on that point around loneliness. So what a wonderful story about your your loneliness group creating some positivity, but it would be interesting to just hear your thoughts on loneliness in the workplace and I how you're approaching.

Catherine Allen, Ella's Kitchen:

It is quite a little hobbyhorse of mine really. But we know from studies already that 45% of people say they felt lonely or they feel lonely most of the time, which is really sad to hear. And we know that it can lead to mental health problems, that people who aren't lonely maybe won't experience. So it's a really serious issue for our society.  I think what I've observed is as society changes, the nature of community has changed.

So whereas 30, 50 years ago you would have had people who were more active in their local communities, for example. I think the other the other things that have happened are obviously around different types of communities. So social media communities which have their positives and they also have their quite distinctive downsides as well.  So I think that's changed things and I think Covid also changed things because we were told that it was dangerous for you to be around other people and that's quite difficult to get rid of psychologically. So all these things are happening in our society and I think businesses are really, really well-placed to be that community that is now lacking outside of work.

Anya Davis, Baringa:

But bringing it back to the sort of economics of it, like do you feel like you're getting a payback for the investment into some of these clean practices?

Catherine Allen, Ella's Kitchen:

Yeah, I'm convinced we are. So we have been a consistently growing business year on year for the last 10 to 15 years. I've only been here 11 years, which is why I can't be clear on that but we've got an enormous EBIT (unsure  of this) so in terms of our figures, we have succeeded commercially and I'm absolutely convinced it's because of our values.

Anya Davis, Baringa:

But what you see is sort of like the next thing or sets of initiatives or where you are taking looking after people and looking after happiness in your organisation. What's in the future for you?

Catherine Allen, Ella's Kitchen:

So I think for us what we are really thinking about at the moment is how do we equip our managers to truly treat people as individuals? Because as with most organisations there are more instances of mental health. Neuro diversity is being talked a lot more about. So it's not just that is truly going to grips with what does that individual want and need to enable them to be at their best.

So management training I think is really crucial to get this to come alive. I think the other piece, which is definitely growing, is this sort of move towards even more flexibility. So things like four day, weeks, for example. So we we have very flexible working right now, but I think that will become more flexible as the years go on.

Anya Davis, Baringa:

If people are listening to this podcast and talking about I want to really instil a culture of happiness and keeping their people happy. What what would be the one piece of advice you could give people.

Catherine Allen, Ella's Kitchen:

One piece of advice, that's hard isn't it? I would say if you have to do one thing, I would train your managers on how to interact with their team and to be kind. I mean, I think people are innately kind, but I think managers also have a difficult job. So it's not as though you're kind of teaching somebody how to have a conversation.  Sometimes it's just giving permission to, you know, it's okay to be authentic and to be you. And I think in in smaller organisations in particular, managers are wearing a manager's hat, but they are also a doer as well. So it's just making sure again that they're prioritising the people stuff over that.

Anya Davis, Baringa:

Yeah, I love that point of giving people permission because it's almost like people feel I have to put a leader's hat on and this is now, this is what I'm supposed to do, and we're not supposed to kind of care what people got up to over the weekend and things. So I think that's a wonderful point to close on.  So thank you ever so much, Catherine. It's been wonderful to chat to you and I'm so excited to see where you and the team are going to be taking the business forward.

Catherine Allen, Ella's Kitchen:

Lovely. Thank you.