Working for a “Big Pub” company – employee listening in a large hospitality organisation

“Has this given you a bit more patience with clients in the future? Seen how hard it is on the other side?” My mother teased. I’d just spent half a phone call with her talking through some frustrations while trying to get an employee listening strategy set up in my new job at one of the UK’s biggest pub chains. 

Whilst my answer at the time was dismissive (“Not really, it just makes me more annoyed that people don’t do it properly…”), I must admit I learned a lot from spending time working in-house in hospitality after a career on the provider side (Best Companies, ORC International, Engine Transformation, People Insight).  

I wanted to jot down some of those learnings for those of you working in (or thinking about working in) one of the best sectors in the UK economy… 

Big companies make employee listening so much more powerful, if you’re willing to do the graft

At one point, our team of 3 were running the equivalent of 22 pieces of research at one time across the organisation. This included: 

• An annual survey 
• 12 randomised “question blocks” at the end of that survey 
• 2 new site opening surveys 
• A project for one of the pub brands collating feedback through GMs 
• 2 “change” listening projects 
• An L&D evaluation for a strategic project and new joiners, onboarding, and leavers surveys.  

“But what about survey fatigue??” I hear you cry… well the beauty is no person in the organisation was involved in more than 3 of these in any quarter. By targeting cleverly across the whole population, we had robust enough data to meet every research need the organisation had, without sending anyone a survey with more than 35 questions or spamming people with research requests.  

This scale of research enabled us to impact every division of the organisation, feeding them insights directly relevant to their own strategies. 

Listening needs are everywhere, people just don’t know what they need (and executives aren’t close enough to the detail to tell you)

We ended up with so much research because we cultivated a powerful stakeholder network at senior leadership and management team levels of the organisation. Almost every part of your organisation should care about what employees think of their work, and very few of them will be collecting feedback in a properly designed way.  

The more people do it themselves, the worse the data the business is making decisions on. As you start to talk to people about their projects, and their evaluation needs, and the assumptions they’re making, the more you’ll find things that should be tested.  

Pub managers are a pain to get to take part in research

Pub managers are absurdly busy, usually only the best ones can get out of the day-to-day and engage with a PubCo more strategically. For more on this, tune into our podcast episode -

Therefore, outside of an overly pushed annual survey with response-rate leaderboards, they’re not going to take the time to tell you what they think.  

If you need to engage with pub managers as a specific population, consider the following options instead:  

• Target annual survey questions to them
• Go sit in their pub when they are on a quiet shift and chat to them 
• Get feedback from their BDMs instead
• Phone the pub and talk with them quickly on the phone.  

If you do any of these, make sure you have a short, sharp list of questions to rattle through (as you won’t have much time), but keep the conversation light (as they’re sociable about lovely people overall). 

Everything is data – and all data is biased

If you fully understand what I mean by this, this is the most freeing thing I can impart to you.  

• Your employee surveys? Biased by being a “point-in-time”, by the questions you ask, by response shortening, and by GM pressure to get a good score. 
• Your pulse survey? Biased by low response rates (only people who care about the topic give feedback) and  
• Your focus group? Biased by attendance and social dynamics (and you as an interviewer) 
• Your phone call with an ops manager? Biased by their own agenda and views 
• The questions asked at an exec Q&A? biased by people trying to look good (if not anonymous) or personal agendas (if anonymous). 
• The conversation had on the table next to you at lunch? Can’t be recorded formally (pesky GDPR), but it can still inform your practice and your conclusions! 

Once you accept this, you stop chasing perfect data and start building a more accurate picture overall. 

Everything is data. It's not about only some methods being “perfect”,  it's about combining everything you can get your hands on so you can triangulate and work out “what is true” in your organisation. Conventional listening methods are only the tip of the iceberg. 

Don’t do anything over Christmas

Seriously. It's not worth the grief. 

Be careful doing things with front-line employees or pub management populations in January/February

People are likely working fewer hours, sales figures look grim, and pubs get a bit depressing. This will bias your data - make sure you manage expectations around trend. 

Don’t underestimate the power of repairs (back of house) and ranging (front of house)

If your job is to fry fish and chips back-of-house, and one of your friers is constantly broken… you don’t care about pretty much any other part of your employee experience. It is a constant frustration that will destroy engagement if left unchecked. Similarly, if you work front-of-house and you’re given bad beer to pull, or a bad menu update, people will complain at you constantly, and your happiness will be impacted!  

Get these basics right and everything else becomes easier. 

Anyway, work in pubs – it’s a fab place to be.  

If you’d like help shaping an employee listening approach that actually works in hospitality or just want someone to talk about hospitality my inbox is always open: jordan@pxhub.io 

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