CHESTNUT ACADEMY
We are excited to announce that we are relaunching Chestnut Academy, but it will look slightly different in 2023. The key aims for the new programme will be up-skilling existing teams, developing future leaders, maintaining legal compliance, attracting new team members and continuing to provide exceptional guest experiences.
We’ve taken what was already a popular academy and made it better by applying the following 10 steps:
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Adding simple structure to career development and creating succession plans
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Providing clear learning objectives for every team member
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Defining expected outcomes from all learning initiatives
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Placing expectations on team to be accountable for their own personal development
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Immersing our teams in their local environments and communities
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Offering externally provided, industry recognised learning events
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Creating internally delivered workshops and comprehensive development programmes
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Training about the importance of people development and how a people-centric culture can be achieved
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Partnering with an industry leading apprenticeship provider
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Providing all of the above in a shorter time period, meaning progression can be achieved more quickly, without compromising quality.
DAY TO DAY LEARNING
Ensuring that all of our team fully understand our own expectations and those of our guests is fundamental to their wellbeing at work. Naturally, we want to enable all team members to perform to the best of their abilities and we have now defined skill sets for every role within the business, using a training matrix.
Our General Managers will review our team members against their defined matrix and offer opportunities to not only up-skill, but also to learn about aspects of their role they may not already be familiar with.
Our matrices give clear definitions about what is required for each role and all of our team members will have visibility of what learning and skills will be required to develop themselves to the next stage of their career with us.
Our annual training calendar allows General Managers to identify suitable learning solutions for individual team members.
OUR COMMITMENT TO LEARNING
We recognise that each person has their own learning style, some may learn through doing, others may learn through listening or reading and others may prefer a combination of a number of styles.
With all of our learning opportunities we will embrace a blended approach, by using a number of different formats to embed the key messages, behaviours and skills within our teams.
We recognise that not everyone is comfortable with learning in particular environments and that some of our team may have difficulties. We are proactively seeking such information when team members sign up for learning events, so our internal trainers or external training providers can be aware, adapt and make reasonable adjustments to ensure every team member has the ability to learn as effectively as possible.
Take a look at out latest team away day that combined learning away from our pubs and kitchens at Houghton Estate in Norfolk.
SUCCESS FROM DAY ONE
Having a great team from day one is what makes us successful and we recognise that the induction is one of the most important aspects of onboarding our new team members.
We will be relaunching our induction process across our pubs, with specific training for management teams. This will ensure they understand the importance of the onboarding process and are committed to investing time in delivering a great induction experience.
Take a look at some of our team members journeys with Chestnut so far through our Growing With Chestnut blog series.