JKS: Diversity can’t be a tick box exercise

There “needs to be the belief in the benefits” of a more diverse workforce, if businesses are going to make meaningful progress in this area, Sunaina Sethi, JKS Restaurants’ co-founder and chief people officer, told MCA’s Restaurant Conference.

Speaking on a women’s leader panel, alongside Gemma Glasson, MD, Wahaca and Joycelyn Neve, founder and MD, Seafood Pub Co, Sethi said that although she was the only senior female on the team when she and her two brothers founded the business, JKS now has a much more mixed team as it has grown.

“I feel the conversation is more balanced, and I think that helps a huge amount,” she told panel host Laura Harper-Hinton, co-founder and CEO, Caravan. New openings also provide an opportunity to start from a blank sheet of paper, in terms of building your teams, which Sethi believes is much easier than trying to unpick a male dominated team further down the line.

“It is something that we have definitely not solved but we are starting to talk about it a lot from a diversity point of view. It’s an educational piece as well. It’s often seen as an uncomfortable topic but often as a tick box project, and as soon as it’s a tick box project I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere.”

Harper-Hinton highlighted various statistics around diversity – the shortcomings in hospitality and also the benefits that diversity can bring to the workforce. For example, 60% of the hospitality workforce in the UK are women, but only 11% of women are represented in senior leadership roles, and only 1% VC funding went to female-founded businesses in 2023.

“We are the second most diverse sector in the UK, but there is still a significant lack of diversity in senior roles,” she said.

Commenting on what businesses can do to support and promote diversity and how you champion it, Glasson said that senior sponsorship, whether that’s of men, women or diverse groups, is really important because it gives people the confidence and space to fail.

“What I certainly continue to feel at times is that fear of failure… what am I not thinking about here? Am I so focused on opportunities in this particular area that I am missing opportunities here? I think just having someone that says, ‘actually you are doing a great job’ […] or ‘have you thought about this?’ in a space where you don’t feel stupid to ask questions is super important,” she explained.

She said Wahaca was less explicit around gender diversity, but talks about opportunity constantly and makes sure that it has having coaching conversations, with managers for example, that are focused on them and what they want, and making sure that the business cultivates opportunities for them.

Meanwhile Neve discussed the introduction of a ‘business leads board’ at Seafood Pub Co, which she said had been hugely positive in encouraging new voices to come forward in the business. “With seven sites we don’t have a huge central team, and retention and promotion from within is incredibly important to us as a business,” she explained.

The creation of the board gave employees a chance to nominate themselves to lead an area of the business, such as compliance, food and wine or events. “We have been amazed by the people that want to be heavily involved in compliance, or who want to be looking after the gardens,” she added. “We get that forum together once a quarter, we put our ideas to people and then they can inform the decision making of the business, so we are not getting involved in group think.”

Neve continued: “We are allowing voices from junior levels to come up and it gives them experience in multi-site management which they wouldn’t have had before, they can see their initiatives going live in other sites, so it’s a win, win because it’s nurturing talent from the business, it’s bringing the best out of people that might not have found their voice yet, giving them the space, but then as a business it’s adding great value to us as well.”

For Sethi, putting people in positions who think differently to you, and challenge the way you do things, ultimately opens up very different opportunities and very different conversations, “and that for me is how you grow”.

Harper-Hinton said that when speaking to others in the sector before hosting the panel, a lot had raised the point that there still needed to be the question of ‘what’s in it for me? What’s in it for my business?’, which she said was a very valid comment to make, but that there are plenty of stats to back up the fact that diversity benefits business.

For example, companies with more than 30% of women execs are more likely to outperform companies with a lower percentage. She also referred to a study by Harvard Business School which found that businesses experienced better commercial performance with a more diverse leadership, and innovation and problem solving improved.

“More in-house career development and more cohesive teams – they are a couple of pretty persuasive things I would argue that might encourage everyone in this room to really start looking at diversity.”