Industry Focus
The power of a positive employee culture
Behind all the great stars of track and field, as well as the divas of the music and business worlds, there are legions of anonymous teams enabling them to deliver the ace serve, the sub-ten-second 100-metre sprint, the velodrome dash for glory, the iconic stage performance, or the stellar sales figures for the board. One such brand particularly encapsulates this approach—Compass Group UK & Ireland—the UK’s largest food and support services company, made up of tens of thousands of employees who provide food and support services to many of the UK’s core infrastructure.
In the UK, Compass works behind the scenes at sports and leisure events, within schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, and care homes. It also works extensively within the private sector, providing food to client offices and boardrooms, as well as workplaces as diverse as oil rigs and military bases. Compass also provides food services to a wide variety of public attractions up and down the country. Despite its sheer scale, and the fact that it is serving millions of meals a day, it is unlikely that people who use its services will have heard of it.
Part of the largest food-service company in the world, the FTSE 100 company Compass Group Plc., is headquartered in Chertsey, Surrey. The business supports a diverse number of sectors that include business and industry, healthcare, education, sports and leisure, defence, offshore, and remote. Each business operates under its own brands and often with no brand at all, as their activity behind the scenes is seen as the clients.
Coronavirus may have put an end to this corporate anonymity as Compass rose to the challenge of the pandemic across its multiple divisions. As a major operative in the entertainment, hospitality, and corporate service worlds, many of its operations closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, where the business supports many of the UK’s critical infrastructure operations and their key workers, its other service offerings have been boosted as a necessary response to the outbreak as personnel were redeployed to the frontline.
The healthcare division, where Compass provides everything from catering to support services including cleaning, portering, security, help desk, and retail outlets to the National Health Service (NHS), private hospitals, and the social care sector, all of which were critical and remain so during the height of the pandemic, seeing its people providing essential services to keep the NHS operating. Services in cleaning, for example, saw activity levels ramped up to meet the increase in demand. The business also supported with the feeding of NHS staff at a number of the temporary COVID-19 hospitals—NHS Nightingale in England and Wales and Louisa Jordan in Scotland—set up as critical-care units to provide COVID-secure care and help alleviate the anticipated strain on the NHS services.
Equally, Compass’s business and industry division, which provides food, facilities management, cleaning, and security services to a broad range of blue-chip corporations, continued to work through the pandemic to ensure distribution centres and food manufacturing plants could keep the wheels of industry turning, even during the deepest depths of the national lockdown.
On the flip side, the Levy UK business, which has a high-profile presence in stadiums and arenas across the country, closed on-site operations overnight. However, working closely with clients, they were able to support the setting up of test centres that were springing up across the UK, seeing the redeployment of its people to roles such as stewarding, which was delivered in partnership with the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
From sport and entertainment stadia to Government and military facilities and offshore oil rigs, retirement homes, and even zoos, the multi-service giant is working out of some of the highest profile and most iconic venues in the country. The Compass teams specialise in integrating with their host businesses, becoming an ambassadorial extension of their customer’s brand, so it is almost a double imperative to get it right the first time and every time in the recruitment and retention of the right personnel, as well as embodying a culture of honesty and transparency in all its agency operations.
Attempting to align a company’s cultural compass so that all behaviours begin and end at the same point, is no easy task. According to the Centre for Retail Research (CRR), internal theft cost industry £1.3 billion in 2019, a conservative figure as this only reflects what was discovered by employers engaging loss protection departments and technologies including data mining and CCTV. Much staff dishonesty goes undetected over years, which is why overarching cultures of honesty and integrity that are hard-baked into a business go a long way to reducing the issue and its brand-damaging associations.
Compass, a member of ORIS Forum’s Café, Dining, and Hospitality LP Forum, has adopted such a strategy and, rather than wait for dishonesty to take root, has instead taken the battle for hearts and minds to the workforce and set the coordinates on its direction of travel in order to take all colleagues on the same journey.
Mission Protect
“Our job is to protect our people and business, and to do this we need to seamlessly align with our clients’ brand values in every possible scenario you can think of and deal with all types of issues—the variety is incredible,” said Damien Barne, Compass’s head of profit protection, risk, and control.
“One minute, the team could be working at a site hosting a global pop icon at one of our venues and the next looking after an issue on an oil rig. No two days are ever the same,” he said.
In hospitality parlance, the profit protection team could be described as the strong cup of coffee or energy drink that keeps the team focused and alert to both the malicious and non-malicious practices, for example compliance issues. While Damien recognises that the majority of employees are honest, his role is to ensure the Compass teams are engaged and educated about profit protection and do not stray into the wrong behaviours that can impact both the client and Compass in terms of brand reputation.
But in the moral maze of everyday commerce, how is it possible for the largest corporations with matching wage bills to direct and guarantee the good behaviour of their employees when they are at work?
Across the retail and hospitality sector in general, staff dishonesty is often seen as not so much a lifestyle choice, but a justification for what are perceived to be low wages or the belief large corporates won’t notice. According to a 2017 survey by non-confrontational interview experts Wicklander-Zulawski, “it’s their own fault because they did not offer me that wage rise” or “they won’t miss it, and they are insured anyway” are across industry in general two of the most common disclosures in staff exit interviews.
There is the old adage that good people can make poor choices. There is also evidence across industry in general that employees would consider stealing if there is opportunity and a guarantee that they will never be caught, providing that they keep it under the radar. A recent survey by Calrest showed that nine in ten businesses have some issue with dishonest staff. In the US, for example 37.5 per cent of employees admitted to stealing on more than one occasion, according to 2020 figures from Statistic Brain, an issue that is calculated to cost American businesses $50 billion every year.
Outside of Compass, the wider retail and hospitality sectors are full of examples of staff who have stolen for years but only got caught because they became greedy or emboldened by the fact that they got away with it for so long. Staff vetting and Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks take place in the sensitive areas such as schools, Government contracts, and hospitals, but many roles are temporary, so other more direct methods have to be brought into play to identify possible dishonesty. By challenging dishonesty through training and education, as well as robust procedures and tight financial controls, Compass is attempting to turn any potential negative action around through a cultural programme of engagement and risk awareness.
Compass, for example, uses robust controls including Shrink School training as part of its induction programme for new managers to make sure they understand the points of vulnerability where loss may occur as part of day-to-day processes and why compliance is key to good performance.
“A huge part of the strategy is about training, coaching, and engagement—it’s about hearts and minds. We have built an e-learning module into our internal training programme, which everyone has to complete, and Shrink School training for managers,” said Damien. “Where our managers have attended Shrink School, we find these units have a greater understanding of company processes, and this leads to improved compliance and financial performance.”
But as Damien admits, changing behaviour is not an overnight task: “Introducing new measures always takes time, but we are definitely getting there through our programme of employee engagement and working cross-functionally.”
The UK profit protection team has made some significant inroads and secured five awards at the Retail Fraud awards, including the Team of the Year Award on two occasions for its comprehensive engagement programme, while Simon Wright and Andre Murrell have both secured Regional Profit Protection Manager of the year awards, and Deepak Kalair, one of Compass’s data analysts, won the Rising Star Award for being an unsung hero of data analytics.
Intelligence-led data analytics are a great resource and critical to helping Compass with complementary technologies, including IntelliQ data mining and Pazien, all of which demonstrates a holistic approach and a dedicated and experienced team forensically analysing the raw performance and financial data across the estate. In addition, Damien has brought the forensic experience of Alice Haynes, a security and loss prevention professional with over twenty years’ experience into the business. Alice, the national investigations manager for Compass UK & Ireland based at the Birmingham head office, has a proven track record for reducing loss through thorough investigations and interviews, case management, and data analysis.
The team is split 60:40 between data analytics and risk and control in order to promote a smart, information-driven strategy and people on the ground. The investigations team probes anomalies based upon that intelligence, and the field risk managers are unit-by-unit driving compliance and coaching on a daily basis to reduce the anomalies in the first instance—the essential hearts and mind activity, which falls under the remit of Catherine Page.
Damien also looks after the risk and control team whose remit is to look more at the financial risk aspects and balance sheet anomalies. He said, “It’s an award-winning team driven by big data to improve financial performance by spotting anomalies and identifying exceptional trends, while the colleagues on the road work to ensure compliance. Alice will then carry out the investigations that come to light from that detailed and forensic analysis.”
Damien and the team regularly review performance across the estate of units, with poor results often seen as an indicator to investigate further. This could be a unit with a high shrink rate, as well as other managerial issues causing a flag of concern to be raised. After embedding a risk awareness culture into the business, it is fair to say that the strategy is based on positive encouragement.
He said, “Part of the induction is a ‘warts and all’ picture of what we do as a function. This equips them with the tools of how we identify risk, as well as the sales opportunities through driving compliance. It is not just about theft and dishonesty but also about reducing waste and improving on-shelf availability so that we can sell more and lose less to protect both the customer and Compass.
“Firstly, we classroom train managers through Shrink School to ensure they have the tools and knowledge they need to manage their business effectively and profitably. We then measure their success through compliance reviews at a later stage and work with them on any areas of improvement that are required. It is important for us to prepare our managers with the right tools and coaching to set them up for success.
Mystery Shopping
Damien and the team use data mining and exception reporting to identify where things are not as they should be, but there is also the secret weapon of mystery shopping. For this approach, Compass outsources to third-party security provider, Lodge Services, whose brief is to take a holistic view of what is going on in an “at-risk” unit. Ostensibly enjoying a cup of coffee, they are in reality sampling the service first-hand and validating the information identified through data mining.
The mystery shoppers evaluate and report on compliance against key procedures, such as accuracy of processing transactions at the point-of-sale, as well as hygiene, presentation, or service standards. “Integrity testing” identifies any non-compliant activity, such as to confirm that cash and card transactions are conducted correctly.
Employee Culture Is Important
Compass is now well advanced in its total loss journey and conducts a minimum of eighty Shrink Schools per month for its managers, coaching on not only the loss prevention message but also the broader risks.
“It is a cultural journey that we are on as everyone thinks about total loss, and this includes waste management, and that helps drive home the right processes.” said Damien. “We have a zero-tolerance approach, but as part of this journey, collaborating cross-functionally with every department from IT, the commercial team, finance, legal, HR, and health and safety, we work to get the right behaviours in place in the first instance. We believe in helping people to get it right, so our first reviews highlight the issues, and we then offer coaching and training specific to their individual units in order to help them increase both compliance and profitability.
“The people piece is massive for us. Our job is to make sure that our people are content in their work—it is all about making sure they feel safe, secure, and appreciated in the jobs that they do. It’s all about having the right training tools and giving colleagues the skills and knowledge to do their job.
“Profit protection reports to the finance team, and a key part of our remit is to reassure them that we are managing financial risk across the business. I can provide that comfort because of the process of engagement and having robust controls in place means that we are doing a good job in proactively finding things faster, and this is making a real difference both in terms of profit protection and brand reputation.”
So, COVID-19 allowing, when you next attend a high-end sporting event, a conference, a music concert, or return to the office, hospital, or school, the chances are good that you will experience a Compass moment in the coffee you drink, the food you buy, and the security you are protected by. This team will have checked you in, fed you, and kept you safe, possibly without you even registering their presence. However, behind this cloak of invisibility is another smaller, dedicated group of profit protection experts who are making sure those looking after the clients’ brands and customers remain on top of their game and, for everyone’s sake, are happy to serve.
