NEW SERIES: Yapping with...Duncan Garrood
“When it comes to digital leadership, there isn’t a dinosaur left!”
At Yapster, we’re fortunate to be working with trail blazing companies in retail and hospitality, and the inspiring people that make them tick. So, over the coming months we’ll be sharing some of the insights we’re gathering from our conversations with these sector leaders, in a new series of blogs. So, welcome to “Yapping with…”
To kick it off, we met up with Duncan Garrood, Chief Executive Officer of Ten Entertainment Group PLC. Duncan joined Ten in December 2018 bringing with him invaluable expertise in the consumer and leisure industries. His impressive career spans 35 years and includes board level experience of both private and public businesses. Prior to Ten, Duncan was the CEO of Bill’s, overseeing 80 sites, and managed 30,000 employees during his time at Alshaya in the Middle East. Before that, he was the CEO of pub group, Punch Taverns. During our insightful chat, Duncan shared his thoughts on how to be a good leader in today’s digital generation, and what prevents some CEOs from pushing out that leadership boat.
“[The best leaders] can adapt to suit the medium they are communicating through, and the age they are working in.”
With 45 sites all trading under the Tenpin brand, Ten Entertainment is the second largest tenpin bowling operator in the UK. Alongside 1,000 bowling lanes across their widespread estate, Ten offer a broad selection of entertainment options and an eclectic mix of food and drinks at their bars and restaurants.
With the leadership arena changing, Duncan understands that in order to be a successful leader, one of the most important skills is dexterity. “[The best leaders] can adapt to suit the medium they are communicating through, and the age they are working in.” But for leaders managing multi-site, deskless organisations, communicating to their entire workforce in person is physically impossible - however agile they might be.
As a result, leaders have been relying on broadcast media to get their message across. While there is a place for videos and group emails every so often, Duncan argues that “in general, broadcasting is not a motivator and doesn’t succeed in building a culture.” So, in order to reach the widest possible audience in an effective way, leaders have to adapt their style of leadership. This comes down, first and foremost, to the communication platform they are using to engage with their staff.
“Broadcasting is not a motivator and doesn’t succeed in building a culture.”
We became Ten’s staff communication hub earlier this year and immediately, onboarding rates were high. According to Duncan, this was due to the fact that “Yapster is both disruptive and subversive” in that it enables skip-level leadership. By encouraging a dialogue between the top and bottom line, for the first time ever, leaders, as well as feeding information to their staff, are being fed information from them.
Promoting a culture of openness through feedback is vital to developing strong internal relationships and lowering retention rates. After all, in a landscape of fragmented operational technology a user and HR friendly central communication system is invaluable to the success of any organisation. “If you build a platform enabling communication as well as business platforms, then you are critical,” says Duncan. Yapster, as a conversational interface, connects people and underlying systems, optimising broken work flows and mitigating the reliance on multiple applications. So, by having everything in one place, “[Yapster] become the DNA of a business, and is therefore irreplaceable.”
We’re proud to be on the first page of Duncan’s phone; the page, he says, dedicated to the apps he can’t live without. So, while we’re already vital to his day-to-day, enabling Yapster to send and receive notifications to and from Ten’s other work systems would position us as the central communication system for his business. Our - and Duncan’s - vision is to be the app users “have to open thirty or forty times a day because everything [they] need to do [their] job effectively is there.”
Improvement to internal communication through Yapster has added derivative value to organisations, and has leveraged ways for them to obtain more. For instance, healthy fast food chain, Tossed, saw a 30% reduction in labour turnover in the first year, saving them £60,000. One high street giant has saved £500,000 per year in supplier reclaims, and our maintenance system and operational checklisting integration means resolving issues - such as broken bowling alleys in Ten’s case - can be actioned quickly and efficiently, mitigating a negative impact on sales and the customer experience.
By optimising workflow communication, Yapster can also be utilised as a platform for social selling. Marston’s PLC has introduced friendly competitions between pub locations and, as a result, has seen a rise in profits and a surge in workplace spirit. Duncan is keen to employ Yapster in the same way at Ten. By applying social selling to their new nachos campaign, he hopes to see an improvement in sales and a stronger sense of staff community through heightened workforce engagement.
“If [internal communication is] done well, it’ll be impossible to out-compete a social leader.”
Duncan believes that effective social leadership, driven by improved communication, will allow leaders to turbo charge their influence. “If done well, it’ll be impossible to out-compete a social leader.” And we couldn’t agree more. With personal recognition being a powerful motivational tool, an upcoming celebration feature will see employers notified to staff birthdays and promotions through our app. Further, a function that drives thematic reports through Yapster in order to alert top line staff to repeated or pending issues should result in quicker intervention and problem solving, improving staff productivity in general.
Duncan has boldly claimed that when it comes to going digital in the leadership arena “there isn’t a dinosaur left”. If this is the case, and all leaders understand the value and necessity of having a digital presence, then the reason for those who don’t must be attributed to confidence. According to Duncan, Yapster provides “a perfect solution” in that it allows leaders to set up a conversation, providing the space and environment for their workers to interact. Plus, as ours is a closed network there are no threats to staff safety or privacy.
It’s important, Duncan says, that if a leader wants true transformation, they musn’t delegate comms responsibilities to a junior member of staff. The simplicity of our mobile messaging, coupled with the way Yapster seamlessly integrates with a multitude of workplace platforms, means that becoming a social leader is easier and more effective than ever before. After all, aren’t the best leaders those who roll with the times?
Lara Businaro
