Dishoom – employer brand
I supported the restaurant company to reimagine staff happiness, focussing on engagement, training and progression to achieve industry-leading staff retention.
I started at Dishoom in 2016 as ‘Team Chatter-walli’ (team comms manager to most of us). At the time, the business was around 6 years old, they had 4 sites in London and around 400 staff. Having mastered the service part of the business (guest satisfaction was consistently high and each new site opened to rave reviews), they wanted to focus on team happiness while preparing for growth.
Though I’d done a short stint in internal communication at Cancer Research UK at the start of my career, most of my experience was in marketing and brand. This worked well for Dishoom, whose ambition was to develop an employer brand even better than their public-facing one. I was keen for the challenge.
The brief was:
Create and launch an employer brand
Improve internal communication and employee engagement
Reduce staff turnover
Make it onto the Best Companies list
By 18 months in the role, together with the incoming Head of People, I had achieved each of these and the remit of my role widened to include marketing, in time for the launch of Dishoom Edinburgh. The business has maintained it’s relentless focus on employee wellbeing and placed 4th in the Best Companies list in 2021, having initially placed 19th in 2017.
Here’s what I worked on as Team Chatter-walli:
Articulating the employee proposition and building it into both recruitment and internal comms. Including video testimonials and a careers microsite (which has since been adapted with the launch of the new website in 2019).
Defining the staff benefits package, on-boarding PerkBox and working with creative agency Lovers to design hero internal collateral including a benefits fold-out for new starters and poster for the Summer party (Family Mela – see image above).
Launching the Dishoom black card for managers – you’ll have to drop me a line to find out what this is.
Auditing and improving the end to end journey for staff, from rewriting recruitment ads, to redesigning the initiation presentation given to all new starters, organising ‘Babu* Breakfast’ for new managers to meet the founders, and creating a survey for leavers.
Working with animation agency We Are Cognitive to communicate the Dishoom Dharma (vision) to staff who may not speak English as a first language.
Re-launching the internal Facebook group, increasing posting frequency and engagement amongst the whole team.
Re-launching bi-weekly team get-togethers to make them more inclusive, including activities rather than just visiting bars.
Record breaking response levels to the team survey, improved team engagement and levels of satisfaction, placing 19th in the Best Companies list.
Hiring a Comms Co-ordinator to support me with day to day team comms and employer brand activities as well as supporting the marketing team.
*Babu is an affectionate term for managers at Dishoom, referring to bureaucrats who are most often found behind a desk.
