Alun Pomfrett: Why It's Important To Make Pre-Approval Work

Something that we could use as part of our inductions that we'd have in our venues. Something that was very clear, our intent and culture to share with our teams and with our customers as well. Let everyone know where we want to be going as a business. Although we've got our vision, our intent and our shared values, clear, clearly communicated there in our key themes.

If I can draw your eye to the bottom left hand corner. The, "Is It Us?", and this is the first step of how we work out our pre-approval and we realised that, although we could create probably a phone book of items that were pre-approved or not pre-approved, it'd be much more effective to process for people to work through.

So, a process and a framework, and if they were able to utilise those, they'd have a framework for autonomy. So, the idea is that if they work through each of this, "Is It Us?" Steps, then using our intent, our values and our themes, they would know if they were authorized or not by virtue of the process.

And then we took that one step further and we created our Make It Right program. So, this is accepting things in business. Don't always go as planned. Either our interactions with customers or possibly internally. Sometimes we have a conversation that doesn't quite land the way we'd like to. So, acknowledging things that don't always go right and creating a step by step process that allows people to fix that and be empowered to do whatever it takes for them to feel good again and for whoever they had the interaction that didn't go so well to make that right. So hopefully in this cheat sheet, we're creating a framework, a shared intent, communicating clearly our values and giving people a framework for autonomy to work through so they can be successful and implement those ideas.

So, moving on from that, Henry, if you could share the next slide for me. Although we're ostensibly a retail business, we very much see ourselves as a hospitality business. We were looking at a way to take these ideas of hierarchy that were instilled in us and probably instilled in most people and dispose of them, but without losing point or what we considered the point.

So, we broke it down into having a role, so what do you do? What's your purpose? And then also a single point of accountability, so another way of looking at this is your focus. So, you have a role, and you have a focus. So, we like the idea of having a dinner table. Someone actually else on the course came up with their team of a brilliant Idea of a coconut tree. So that's Sam, she works for Dogstar brilliant charity and her team and her idea for a coconut tree inspired us to create something relevant. And that's to give everybody a seat at the dining table. So, everybody is welcome. Everyone has a place. There's no hierarchy. Everyone is as equally important to making the business work as everyone else.

Straight from the get-go, whether you're the MD or the kitchen porter, you have a place with us and you have a story that's useful, shareable and vital for the success of our team. So, two very simple concepts that hopefully share visually our ambitions really as a company for the future and our values. Very quickly that’s the two pieces of work that were inspired by the Level 7 framework that we've come up with that we'd like to share with you.

Henry: Excellent. Thank you, Alun. And Alun runs a chocolate company and the prizes that you, there's prizes for the best shirt and prizes for the best happy workplace and you'll get something from Cocoa Amore. 

Alun: Awesome.

Henry: And apparently Vicky says the chocolate is amazing. So yeah, okay.

Alun: Thanks for the plug. 

Henry: So thank you, Alun. Thank you very much for that.