Ash Khan, Head of People at Joe & the Juice talks to Lydia Christie, Head of Retail & Leisure at Howard Kennedy, about the importance of great people culture, why diversity matters in the workplace and how digitalisation is vital for growth.
Founded by Danish businessman Kaspar Basse in 2002, Joe & the Juice has become one of the most recognisable cafe brands on the high street, known for its soundtrack and upbeat atmosphere, not to mention healthy menu.
Lydia Christie (LC): Joe & the Juice have seen record growth in 2023. What are the secret ingredients to your success and how did you leverage them to grow your business?
Ash Khan (AK): The biggest thing for us was our digitalisation and omnichannel growth, really pushing sales via our app and third party apps. Consumer behaviour also helped, as there’s a lot of love for our brand, but it’s also down to our people – we’ve got a very loyal employee base that really care about the business and are extremely passionate about it. This year we had the highest retention rate of staff that we’ve ever had in the UK, with more employees staying on and going into more senior roles due to their length of service.
LC: How do you foster a positive and engaging work culture at Joe & the Juice?
AK: Heavy investment in people. We really put our people first. Whether it’s family-friendly policies or offering great benefits, like discounted products. We really reward people too – we have a massive internal succession rate, 85-90 percent of our people have been promoted – our regional director and head of ops both started off as juicers!
LC: How do you recruit, train, and retain talent in today’s competitive market?
AK: We actually never struggle to attract people to work at Joe – the brand has a crazy organic pull. We get thousands of applications every time we advertise a new role. I think people want to work for us because we’re quite a fun, funky, fresh brand.
We have a campus where everyone in the UK spends a week in a simulated learning centre, where they learn to make sandwiches, juices, coffees from the experts.
LC: How do you foster a positive and engaging work culture at Joe & the Juice?
AK: The culture is unlike any other – we don’t do the whole corporate stuff, it’s more of a family, which is down to our founder. Joe’s DNA is that a juicer isn’t a machine, it’s a person. We have lots of staff events throughout the year social calendar for our staff. There’s two huge parties every year – we have a huge social budget.
LC: Joe & the Juice have a diverse and international team. What are the main – from fitness bootcamps to mental health workshops– we have a weekly benefits and challenges of this?
AK: The main benefit is that there’s always someone to relate to at Joe – I think we probably have every nationality represented! We always get feedback about how included everyone feels and we’re really proud of the fact that over half the workforce is female.
In terms of challenges, Post-Brexit, it’s more difficult for us to secure staff visas.
LC: How do you measure and improve employee satisfaction and performance at Joe & the Juice?
AK: We have an employee satisfaction survey four times a year which is completely anonymous. We ask people to measure their journey, from training onwards, and what we can improve on. The data is sent to our HQ in Denmark and they come back to each of the 16 markets and tell them what they need to be doing differently. It could be employee engagement with management, not having enough training, wanting higher wages.
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