People Awards 2024: Communication and Influencing Award – Pizza Pilgrims

Shortlist

• Pizza Pilgrims
• Rick Stein Group

The winner of the Communication and Influencing Award has developed a revolutionary strategy that harnesses the latest technology to ensure employees have the information they need at their fingertips.

Restaurant group Pizza Pilgrims, which has 24 pizzerias across the UK, has developed a communication solution around four key areas: informal messaging between colleagues, company updates, strategic changes and feedback. In addressing these areas, the business used multiple channels and platforms to ensure the effective dissemination of information, while also building relationships across a business that covers a vast geographical area.

At the heart of the system is an absence of hierarchy, with team members encouraged to contact anyone in the business to ask questions and share feedback. To promote informal messaging, Pizza Pilgrims used Meta’s Workplace platform, where team members posted more than 80,000 messages in one month, including more than 25 pictures of celebrations.

Company updates are sent in concise weekly bulletins via Workplace, with the electronic messages reinforced at monthly general manager and head chef meetings.

Strategic project launches and larger company changes, such as new menu or technology launches, are communicated at biannual management team meetings with information then disseminated through departments and sites. At these meetings the departments also share feedback from the past six months and discuss upcoming developments.

Feedback across all ranks is led by ‘team heroes’, who meet with the business’s people team every month to discuss key topics. Every six months Pizza Pilgrims also launches a happiness survey, where team members can highlight areas they would like to see improvement.

In the interests in ensuring information can be accessed simply by all employees Pizza Pilgrims created its very own chat bot, named Joshua. Joshua is available 24/7 to answer employee questions and can provide instant answers to queries such as ‘who is the general manager at the Soho restaurant?’ or ‘what shifts are available at Euston?’. The bot can share general information, company policies, job specifications and information about perks. An extension to Joshua is now being developed so teams will be able to access live information such as the number of pizzas sold or forecasts for the coming week.

This innovative strategy shows the importance Pizza Pilgrims has placed on effective and easy communication and the judges were hugely impressed with the elegance of their multi-faceted solution.

Judges’ comments

Sally Beck, general manager, Royal Lancaster London: “A top entry. Their simple communication process covered all bases and is simple and engaging. This is coupled with a library and the use of Joshua to influence the team to further engagement and success. Worthy winners.”