Why Happy Teams Are Your Biggest Scaling Advantage

Insights from CODE Hospitality's Happiest Places to Work 2026, in partnership with Planday

Growing a hospitality business is hard. Growing it without losing the culture, energy, and sense of care that made it special in the first place? That's the real test.

Last month, we partnered with CODE Hospitality to bring together four operators who have lived this challenge — and come out the other side with hard-won lessons to share. At an evening hosted at Shoreditch Arts Club, panellists from Black Bear Burger (CODE's 2026 overall Happiest Places to Work winner), Clays, Woodhead Restaurant Group, and Bancone explored one central question: how do you scale a business without losing the soul of it?

What emerged was a clear and compelling argument: a genuinely happy, well-supported team isn't just a nice-to-have. It's the engine that makes scaling possible.

The Scaling Paradox

Every multi-site operator in the room knew the feeling. When you have one site, you can see everything, be part of everything, and carry the culture personally. The moment you open a second site, you face what Woodhead Restaurant Group Director James Fryer called "the magnetism of the back office" — the creeping pull away from your team and toward your inbox.

"All of a sudden, something that was very achievable by one person being present every day... suddenly you feel very distant from your teams," James explained. "I was messing up people's names and probably stretching myself a little bit thin. That was a horrible moment."

It's a moment most multi-site operators recognise. And it's exactly the point at which your people processes either hold the business together or let it fray.

Culture Doesn't Scale Itself — You Have to Build the Structures That Carry It

The insight that ran through the whole evening: culture is not self-replicating. It travels through process.

At Clays, HR Director Sian Danks put it plainly: "Consistency carries culture." When the business had one site, culture lived in the room. As they expanded to four, they needed to ensure it lived in their systems — in how they hired, onboarded, trained, and developed people.

"We really asked ourselves: what does it mean to work at Clays?" Sian said. "We have our values and our behaviours, and all of our managers are aligned to them." That alignment doesn't happen by accident. Clays built it deliberately, including into their recruitment process — using scenario-based screening questions designed to surface integrity and values fit before someone ever walks through the door.

Seb Shaw, Head of Operations at Black Bear Burger, described a similar journey. Black Bear started as a street food stall — founders Steve and Liz on the grill and front of house. Ten years and nine sites later, the culture had to become something bigger than any individual personality.

"As we've grown, the culture almost becomes more than the personalities that founded it," Seb said. "So it's more than just the person — and we're actually going through an exercise right now to put that on paper so we can scale it."

Bancone Operations Director Lena Yong keeps it simple and structured: four pillars — We Care, We Create, We Commit, We Celebrate. "With the four pillars, they understand their purpose and they know clearly the direction," she said. The simplicity is the point. Complex frameworks don't survive the handoff from HQ to a busy restaurant floor. Clear ones do.

The Process Is the Culture

This is perhaps the most important lesson for any growing hospitality business: the right processes aren't bureaucracy. They're how your values travel from site to site, manager to manager, new starter to long-tenure team member.

Induction is where culture begins. Every panellist spoke about induction as non-negotiable. Lena attends every Tuesday induction at Bancone in person. "You wanna find me, you know where I am," she said. James runs a group induction every three months — partly to meet new starters, but partly as a deliberate culture touchpoint. "I learn so much about people on that day," he said. "When I can put a story to a face, it all clicks."

Empowering managers is how culture multiplies. At Black Bear, Seb's team recently launched manager-controlled "prize boxes" — tangible reward kits that each site manager can use to recognise great work without having to seek approval from head office. "We were the gatekeepers of prizes," Seb explained. "The managers were coming to us saying, someone's done really great, can I get them this? We wanted to enable them to have their own autonomy." Giving managers that power isn't just operationally efficient — it makes the recognition feel immediate, genuine, and local.

Woodhead Restaurant Group takes a similar approach at a structural level. "You manage one of our venues, it's your venue," James said. The central team absorbs the "boring stuff" — maintenance, compliance, strategy — so that site managers can be, as James put it, "one hundred percent obsessive about the thing in front of them: their teams and their guests."

Predictability in the things that matter. For all the creativity and unpredictability that hospitality thrives on, James was clear: "You want predictability in your team's work-life balance. You want predictability in their rota." Operational consistency — knowing when you're on, knowing when you'll eat, knowing what's expected — is the foundation that everything else is built on. Planday's workforce management platform exists precisely to make that consistency achievable, even as the rota gets more complex across multiple sites.

Recognition Scales Too — If You Design It In

One of the most revealing moments of the evening was a discussion about what meaningful recognition looks like when you have 115 staff across five restaurants, or 200 people across six pasta bars.

Seb is launching a programme where every team member who has been with Black Bear for a year receives a special apron or over-shirt, with a badge added for each subsequent year. It sounds simple. The impact is not.

"If you're starting in a kitchen — maybe it's your first job — you can see that everyone's been there for two, three, maybe four years. It's a subtle, subconscious cue that this is somewhere to stay."

Bancone gives long-tenured team members sponsored trips to Italy, spa vouchers, and experiences including CODE subscriptions. Woodhead has built a comprehensive benefits package that includes access to mental health professionals, private health insurance, and increasingly, financial planning support — benefits that reflect the fact that their team are careerists, not just passers-through.

And Black Bear has one practice that stood out for its elegance: before rotas are written, Seb checks upcoming birthdays and alerts managers to proactively offer the day off — rather than waiting for the team member to ask.

"It's a really small thing, but you just feel noticed. It means a lot to everyone."

These aren't expensive programmes. What they share is intentionality — someone in leadership thinking ahead about how the team will feel, and building a process to make that feeling consistent at scale.

Feedback That Actually Changes Things

Scaling creates distance. The antidote to distance is feedback — but feedback done well, not just ticked off.

Clays has moved beyond satisfaction scores toward rich, open-ended questions that surface the real picture. "We ask things like: who was the last person that got promoted, and why do you think they got promoted?" Sian explained. "When we're really busy, what value do you think we don't uphold? The insights we get from that type of feedback are so much richer."

Woodhead keeps surveys minimal and makes the follow-through the priority. "We ask very simple questions: what do you want more of, what do you want less of," James said. "And then in January, we communicate back: this is what you said, this is what we're doing about it. That becomes self-perpetuating. They know it's not just a survey for show — there was a result."

The principle matters: feedback only builds trust if the loop gets closed.

Building a Better Business, Not Just a Bigger One

The question Hilary Armstrong put to the panel near the end of the evening was the sharpest one of the night: how confident are you that you're building a better place, not just a bigger one?

Sian's answer got to the heart of it: "Growing is not just a number of venues. If people don't truly feel valued, you haven't actually grown."

James described how opening new sites at Woodhead has almost always been driven by the need to create the next step for brilliant people — not by a grand business plan. "We've got brilliant people, and if we don't do something with them, they will go somewhere else."

Seb acknowledged the honest complexity: "If you ask me on any given day, I'll be good, bad, sideways. What we're continuing to learn is that it's really important occasionally to take a big step back and look at the whole company and think: actually, I think we're heading in the right direction."

That kind of reflective honesty, built into how a business leads itself, is itself a cultural act.

What This Means for Your Business

The businesses on the panel aren't outliers. They're operators who made a deliberate decision to treat their people as the primary driver of commercial performance — and to build the processes that turn that belief into daily reality.

The takeaways are practical:

• Define your culture in writing, so it can travel beyond its founders

• Build induction as a culture event, not just an admin task

• Empower managers to recognise and reward their teams locally

• Create predictability in rotas, communication, and career paths

• Ask richer feedback questions — and close the loop visibly

• Design your benefits package around who your team are becoming, not just who they are today

At Planday, we exist to help shift-based businesses run more smoothly for the people who work in them. The right workforce management platform won't build your culture for you — but it will give your managers the time and clarity they need to do it themselves.

If you'd like to see how Planday supports operators as they scale, get in touch with our team.

This event was part of CODE Hospitality's Happiest Places to Work 2026 series, in partnership with Planday.