Smiling & Sharing

Years ago I saw a documentary about how TGI Friday’s trained their people. In their headquarters, one by one, potential new recruits would stand on a stage and amuse the others with a joke, a story, even a song. The compelling logic was that if they could entertain colleagues, they could entertain customers. This, and the brilliantly simple idea of the waiting team kneeling to be eye-level with the diner, has helped make it valued last year as a £300m company.

Pret A Manger has taken this to another level. It once engaged customers in its alternative loyalty programme by randomly giving some free coffees. By doing so, it did that thing every business should strive to achieve – turning a customer into a fan.

Its ‘Make Someone Smile’ campaign meant the recipient of a free coffee got a special sleeve on their carton to pass on to someone else, friend or stranger, so they too could have a free coffee. The hope was they would post the results on social media.

Deciding who to give the sleeve to is random; the idea was far from it. George Fieldman, a psychologist who has researched random acts of kindness at Oxford, says: “Altruism – the act of doing something for somebody else at a cost to yourself – has a fascinating effect. It can help us feel better about ourselves… it can create authentic feelings of joy; not just for the person on the receiving end, but also for the person doing the giving.”

Twitter and Facebook, natural domains for Pret customers, saw a rush of films, pictures and elaborate cartoons expressing how a tiny gesture has had a huge impact.

That was then and this is now.

We now live in a world that needs more than random acts of kindness. We need concerted acts of kindness. Kindness needs to be embedded into a company’s very core and no longer a one-off marketing initiative or a CSR charitable donation, important as those things are.
I remember a few years ago at my last restaurant Roast meeting the head of a local charity who told me a story which I have often repeated. She said she had been in the restaurant recently to meet someone for a coffee and a bar tender had been less than 100% professional in dealing with the request. One of our managers was passing by at the time and had clocked the incident. When the charity head later asked for her bill, the manager came over and said to her she had noticed how the bartender had conducted himself and so there was no bill to settle. “That’s our company culture,” she added.

Restaurants, bars and cafes are not usually associated with kindness – more often with hurried service so they can get you off the table and sell it on to someone new. But in this new emerging order that simply won’t wash any more. When I was researching which PR company we would use for my next restaurants, I asked a few firms I knew how they would undertake empathetic marketing activities. In other words, how do I not just seek to fill them with people, but to fill them with people who share the same values as us? Only one firm understood the need and rose to the challenge. Guess which one.

That was before the pandemic. I imagine the dial has changed again since then and it will be customers asking us what it is about what we do that will make them choose us over a competitor. In the past, that would be about a place’s interior, the level of service, the food and drink and value for money. That won’t change but there will be a new layer of consumer consideration that will emerge.
Firstly, we will be asking who looked after their employees fairly during the crisis, who used their physical spaces to help feed frontline NHS workers and the homeless, who told their shareholders not to expect a dividend before they could pay their teams.
Before, most people thought of kindness in terms of charity or the ability to smile. More permanently, it will mean decency, doing the right thing and a new moral compass rather than sugar coating.

There’s a project to create a London College of Food which I’m on the advisory board of and at our first meeting we were presented with a plan to attract more young people to take up the many career opportunities the hospitality sector had to offer (then) and train them to be fit for purpose. Not for the first time, I made myself the most unpopular person in the room by objecting. We need, I said, to start by training owners, operators and investors to change our ways – to pay Living Wage, to give people two consecutive days off, to open up about the fact that over half of UK chefs are reported to have mental health issues. Otherwise we’re propping up a failing regime. This of course went down like a lead balloon with the big restaurant groups in the room.

That taught me an important lesson. You can’t really, truly teach people kindness. For it to have authenticity, it has to embed itself and emerge in your company’s sole – not just that of the founder. Only then will it spread through the tentacles of everything you do and everyone you reach.

Iqbal Wahhab OBE
Founder of London restaurants The Cinnamon Club and Roast and long-time campaigner on race
Twitter: @iqbalwahhab
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iqbal-wahhab-obe-324b293/

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Smiling & Sharing

Years ago I saw a documentary about how TGI Friday’s trained their people. In their headquarters, one by one, potential new recruits would stand on a stage and amuse the others with a joke, a story, even a song. The compelling logic was that if they could entertain colleagues, they could entertain customers. This, and the brilliantly simple idea of the waiting team kneeling to be eye-level with the diner, has helped make it valued last year as a £300m company.

Pret A Manger has taken this to another level. It once engaged customers in its alternative loyalty programme by randomly giving some free coffees. By doing so, it did that thing every business should strive to achieve – turning a customer into a fan.

Its ‘Make Someone Smile’ campaign meant the recipient of a free coffee got a special sleeve on their carton to pass on to someone else, friend or stranger, so they too could have a free coffee. The hope was they would post the results on social media.

Deciding who to give the sleeve to is random; the idea was far from it. George Fieldman, a psychologist who has researched random acts of kindness at Oxford, says: “Altruism – the act of doing something for somebody else at a cost to yourself – has a fascinating effect. It can help us feel better about ourselves… it can create authentic feelings of joy; not just for the person on the receiving end, but also for the person doing the giving.”

Twitter and Facebook, natural domains for Pret customers, saw a rush of films, pictures and elaborate cartoons expressing how a tiny gesture has had a huge impact.

That was then and this is now.

We now live in a world that needs more than random acts of kindness. We need concerted acts of kindness. Kindness needs to be embedded into a company’s very core and no longer a one-off marketing initiative or a CSR charitable donation, important as those things are.
I remember a few years ago at my last restaurant Roast meeting the head of a local charity who told me a story which I have often repeated. She said she had been in the restaurant recently to meet someone for a coffee and a bar tender had been less than 100% professional in dealing with the request. One of our managers was passing by at the time and had clocked the incident. When the charity head later asked for her bill, the manager came over and said to her she had noticed how the bartender had conducted himself and so there was no bill to settle. “That’s our company culture,” she added.

Restaurants, bars and cafes are not usually associated with kindness – more often with hurried service so they can get you off the table and sell it on to someone new. But in this new emerging order that simply won’t wash any more. When I was researching which PR company we would use for my next restaurants, I asked a few firms I knew how they would undertake empathetic marketing activities. In other words, how do I not just seek to fill them with people, but to fill them with people who share the same values as us? Only one firm understood the need and rose to the challenge. Guess which one.

That was before the pandemic. I imagine the dial has changed again since then and it will be customers asking us what it is about what we do that will make them choose us over a competitor. In the past, that would be about a place’s interior, the level of service, the food and drink and value for money. That won’t change but there will be a new layer of consumer consideration that will emerge.
Firstly, we will be asking who looked after their employees fairly during the crisis, who used their physical spaces to help feed frontline NHS workers and the homeless, who told their shareholders not to expect a dividend before they could pay their teams.
Before, most people thought of kindness in terms of charity or the ability to smile. More permanently, it will mean decency, doing the right thing and a new moral compass rather than sugar coating.

There’s a project to create a London College of Food which I’m on the advisory board of and at our first meeting we were presented with a plan to attract more young people to take up the many career opportunities the hospitality sector had to offer (then) and train them to be fit for purpose. Not for the first time, I made myself the most unpopular person in the room by objecting. We need, I said, to start by training owners, operators and investors to change our ways – to pay Living Wage, to give people two consecutive days off, to open up about the fact that over half of UK chefs are reported to have mental health issues. Otherwise we’re propping up a failing regime. This of course went down like a lead balloon with the big restaurant groups in the room.

That taught me an important lesson. You can’t really, truly teach people kindness. For it to have authenticity, it has to embed itself and emerge in your company’s sole – not just that of the founder. Only then will it spread through the tentacles of everything you do and everyone you reach.

Iqbal Wahhab OBE
Founder of London restaurants The Cinnamon Club and Roast and long-time campaigner on race
Twitter: @iqbalwahhab
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iqbal-wahhab-obe-324b293/

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