Our Client
Lynwood & Co is a Cotswolds-based café/bakery group with 90 employees. Its first store opened in 2015 in Lechlade and the business has grown organically, with seven sites to date. Lynwood is heavily influenced by Australian café culture, with outstanding service as its driving force. The cafés are all serviced by their own central production unit in Carterton, providing sites with a consistent offering of artisan bakery, eat-in savoury and sweet items and ready-made take-home wholesome meals. Lynwood’s aim is to be the leading café/bakery group in the Cotswolds, with a minimum of eight cafés, a wholesale bread/pastry arm as well as a home delivery service.
The Challenge
Lynwood’s strapline is BREAD, COFFEE, HAPPINESS. Its core belief is delivering exceptional customer service, as it relies heavily on regular, repeat custom. Lynwood cafés are considered ‘local hubs’ and they are seen as an asset to the communities in which they are located.
Internal communication has always been challenging for Lynwood, given the sometimes-temporary nature of hospitality staff and a requirement for commonalities across all cafés. Like most growing businesses, it has had its share of growing pains but it was unable to directly pinpoint where the issues lay and how to address them. It was confident that resolving communication challenges would lead to improved staff retention, customer happiness and an increase in revenue.
“Reaching out to our staff and asking for their opinions via a survey has been a promising step forward for us. It shows the team we are serious about their experience at Lynwood and that we plan to address any issues quickly. The team at ICC has been incredibly approachable and has spent some ‘one-on-one time’ with our staff. “This personal approach has had a tremendously positive effect on the team, improving and enhancing their daily life not only at work but personally as well.”
Rob Broadbent, Founder and CEO
Our Brief
Lynwood & Co approached ICC for assistance in increasing staff morale by finding better ways to engage employees, as well as recommendations on how to better empower managers to assert more responsibility and accountability. Lynwood wanted to facilitate a deep dive into its operational culture to find what works and what does not from an employee’s perspective.
The ICC Solution
The first step in the ICC solution was the deployment of the ICC Cultural Analysis, to help Lynwood staff to fully understand their motivations to come to work, the reasons behind any ‘choke points’ that make their work difficult, and to root out any underlying cultural challenges that may not be recognised by the Lynwood management team.
On completion of the diagnostic, ICC attended the Lynwood management team meeting to present the data and findings and outline areas of interest. The team’s response was open-minded, agreeing that it had learnt more about the staff experience while also identifying key differentiators in the Lynwood culture that were worth defending alongside choke points that would form the basis of planned improvement actions.
The Results
The management team meeting initiated immediate results, with managers agreeing on priority focus areas and identifying some quick fixes that would benefit the staff. Inevitably, the team defaulted to viewing the challenges with an operational mindset, but ICC challenged the group to develop responses from a business leaders’ point of view, and to ‘get out of the weeds’ when considering solutions. This catalysed the topic of management development, as well as ensuring actions were not solely operationally or emotionally led.
Through this process, we identified that Lynwood managers have received limited ‘management’ training to date and would benefit from some developmental support: to help them better support their teams and contribute more fully to the growth of the business. This formed the second stage of ICC’s solution, with implementation in 2023.