10 Things We Learned from Hospitality’s Top People People

How do you grow a hospitality business without losing the culture, values and team spirit that got you there in the first place? As part of CODE’s Happiest Places to Work 2026, in partnership with Planday (view full list here), we brought together the industry’s top ‘people people’ at Shoreditch Arts Club in London to discuss how to keep a happy team while scaling your business. Here’s what our panellists – Seb Shaw, operations director at Black Bear Burger (overall winner of CODE’s Happiest Places to Work 2026); Sian Danks, HR director at Clays; James Fryer, director of Woodhead Restaurant Group; and Lena Yong, operations director at Bancone – had to say.

“Most of our senior team have progressed into those positions within the company and that in itself trickles down to everybody else. They see growth’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing, it’s opportunity. We’re going to give the team aprons with some kind of badge that shows how long you’ve been there. If you are starting to work in a kitchen, maybe it’s your first job or you’ve worked in one or two places before, if you can see everybody’s been there for two, three, maybe four years, it’s a subtle cue that this is somewhere you stay.’

Seb, Black Bear Burger

“For me, it all starts with induction. Every Tuesday, we have an induction day at Bancone on Golden Square. I always make my way to meet all new starters on induction day every Tuesday. When you scale your business, it’s important for each and every one of the team to feel there’s someone looking after them.  It’s a really powerful message from induction to their first day, first week, first month, and hopefully many years.”

Lena, Bancone

“Its unpredictability is one of the things that drew me to hospitality. I love every day being different.  What I have to remember and learn is there’s good predictability and there’s bad predictability. You want predictability in your team’s work-life balance; you want predictability in their rota. But I love when every day is different; I love service. It takes the most incredible type of person to be able to [handle it]. But when you’re scaling, you do have to recognise where unpredictability can be a bad thing.”

James, Woodhead Restaurant Group

“Growth is not just the number of venues that you have. If you’re people don’t feel valued, you haven’t grown.”

Lena, Bancone

“We were driven to open our second site because we had to face the reality that if we didn’t provide the next step for our people, someone was going to come along and give them a better opportunity.  Every venue we have ever opened has been because of that same problem. It’s a really dumb and simple business strategy but it seems to work well for us and means we’re surrounded by incredible people all the time.”

James, Woodhead Restaurant Group

“Sometimes as we’ve grown we’ve found ourselves wedded to certain aspects of the business that in reality or practicality don’t work, so we try to embed a continuous improvement mindset. How we work with our teams now doesn’t have to be how we always do things. It’s really important to iterate, to learn and adjust and take feedback on board.”

Sian, Clays

“As you grow, when you’re in amongst it every day, it can be really difficult to take a step back and ask ‘Are we actually heading in the right direction?’ It’s really important to take a big step back and look at the whole company and say actually ‘I think we’re kind of heading in the right direction’ because [when you focus on] the minutiae, it can always feel like the last decision was the wrong decision.”

James, Woodhead Restaurant Group

‘Our teams are very supportive of our growth. A lot have joined to come on the journey with us. Growing has just created a bigger community who have a passion for the same thing.”

Seb, Black Bear Burger

“Taking what you have embedded in one site into a second site is a really interesting experience. For us, we really focused on developing our talent internally and growing people to take our culture and our processes into that next venue. Having those processes embedded and having managers know what good looks like has really made a difference. We believe that consistency carries culture.”

Sian, Clays

“The journey we’ve been through, it’s been very much founder-led. As we’ve grown, the culture almost becomes more important than the personalities that founded it. We’re going through a process at the moment where we’re trying to put that on paper so that we can scale it. We’ve gone through a journey where we’ve grown and evolved the culture and now we’re in the next chapter, where it’s scaling that culture. It’s exciting.”

Seb, Black Bear Burger

In partnership with

Great service starts before guests walk through the door, and great teams are built with intent. That’s why Planday is supporting CODE’s Happiest Places to Work again – to celebrate the businesses getting it right.

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