About D&D London

Employee development has always been central to D&D’s success. They recognise that great training is fundamental to delivering quality and exceptional service. It’s also vital in equipping the company to overcome the industry wide skills shortages at a senior level. As well as a company induction, role specific skills and standards training and the statuary e-learning programme, internal staff are able to development their career against a simply competency framework that facilitates growth toward management roles (either front of house or in the kitchen). Career development is supported by a quarterly appraisal process called 'Talking Talent' and a series of unique industry leading development programmes that link to the competency framework. 'Step Forward' is the internal programme aimed at helping entry level employees get a taste of what it takes to be a great supervisor. 'Rise' is the management training programme that helps supervisors develop towards management roles (this year 30 employees have successfully completed these programmes with double that signed up to start in November). 'Accelerate Leader’s' programme takes top managerial talent and develops them as Leaders. They also run Love Wine, a collection of training (including WSET levels 1 -3) aimed at developing an employee’s ability to engage with customers about wine and utilise suppliers to deliver a range of product based sessions. As a way of attracting the best new talent D&D run a chef apprentice. More recently the company held a communication skills workshop developed around the Paralympic sport of Goal Ball.

D&D have a group induction (which all new starters attend) and also publish various videos by David and Des; however as a collection of individual restaurants they have deliberately avoided overtly communicating the group purpose, values and outrages ambitions. This is because they do not want to be seen as corporate. For this company it’s far more important to focus on celebrating the individuality of each restaurant by ensuring their purpose, values and ambitions are felt or experienced rather than enforced via the obligatory posters on the wall. They focus on simple, uncomplicated and people centred communication. The aim is to create a human element using stories of success as metaphors about what’s important. Managers are encouraged to translate purpose and values into the strategies detailed in each businesses operating plan. They make use of the customer focused marketing and social media activities to internally communicate the outrageous ambition, after all an interview in the Telegraph with the MD and Chairman declaring their global ambitions is far more powerful than anything HR could produce. D&D recognise that this approach is fallible, relying heavily on the ability of Managers to translate purpose, values and ambitions into their day job, but they also passionately believe that this approach is fundamental to who they are and what they do.

As a collection of over 30 unique businesses D&D’s general Managers are empowered to develop, with the support of HR, unique ways to recognise and reward the performance of their teams. This means that there isn’t one fixed approach, but a series of flexible incentives and rewards. From a group perspective one reward they do offer, which they believe is a unique way of rewarding the performance of key talent, is to give Head Chefs the opportunity to become a chef-patron. London is currently the epicentre of the culinary world but the industry is suffering chef shortage (there is a war for talent raging in the kitchen). The reputation of the chef and the restaurant are intrinsically linked, which means that it is crucial to retain talented and successful chefs. As a chef-patron they receive a small percentage of the company, so in effect the name of the chef becomes synonymous with the restaurant. Most chefs dream of one day owning their own business and D&D feel that offering this type of reward provides a long term goal that facilitates engagements, aids retention and incentives culinary performance in a challenging and highly competitive market. Each chef is set their own performance target, which will be based in part on achieving financial targets but also heavily waited on performance from food scores on Trip Advisor and Open Table through to achieving industry recognition via Michelin Stars or AA rosettes.