The brewer and pub operator, which was named Best Managed Pub Company, 2 to 50 sites, and Best Sustainable Pub Company at this year’s Publican Awards, said investment in people had become increasingly important amid rising employment costs.
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Kate Price, people director at St Austell Brewery, told The Morning Advertiser (MA) that the business had placed greater emphasis on building “strong, resilient leaders”, with rising employment costs making retention more important.
The comments come after reports that around 9,000 jobs were lost across hospitality in December 2025 alone, as rising employment costs and the employer NICs increase continued to take hold.
“It is now more expensive than ever to employ people,” she said. “But not just because of that, it’s the right thing to do to ensure that you don’t lose the people that you don’t want to lose.
“To have the right people in the right places is going to not only develop the right culture, but also ensure that you add that commercial value to the business.”
Invested in training
Price said St Austell had invested in leadership development across the organisation, from high potential programmes for junior teams and middle managers to senior leadership training for its top 20 leaders.
This includes coaching skills, financial acumen and awareness of how AI can be integrated into leadership.
“Whilst we do skills development around essential skills, the focus has been much more around having good leaders who can develop their teams and the right cultures, where people feel they belong, feel that they’re welcome and can fulfil their potential,” she said.
St Austell tracks employee engagement twice a year, including whether staff feel they have access to the learning and development they need to do their jobs well. Price said 80% of employees now answer favourably to that question, while the latest pulse survey showed employee engagement at 70%, five percentage points above the UK hospitality mean.
“We see a positive correlation between those pubs with the best employee engagement and those sites with the lowest turnover,” she said.
Alongside leadership development, St Austell has been investing in specialist skills across guest experience, beer, wine and sustainability, including guest experience champions, beer champions and wine training.
Price said 100% of the company’s leadership group had completed carbon literacy training over the past year.
“Our biggest cost is our people, so we need to make sure we’ve got people that have got the right emotional intelligence alongside the right functional skills to really develop and maximise their teams,” she said.
Artificial intelligence
St Austell is also using AI to support learning, productivity and back office functions, although Price said there were no active plans to introduce it front of house.
The company is using Microsoft Co Pilot across some support functions and AI within Thrive, its communication and learning platform, which Price said is used regularly by close to 90% of employees.
“At the moment, we don’t have any active plans to introduce it front of house,” she said. “I think it would be more back of house to reduce administration, but also free people up to do more in the roles that they’re in and add more value.”
She said AI was helping the company create learning modules more quickly, with courses that previously took several months to build now able to be produced “almost within a day”.
St Austell has also appointed a new technology director, who is due to start in the next couple of months, to support the creation of a longer term AI strategy.
On recruitment, Price said St Austell had increasingly focused on developing talent from within, particularly building a pipeline of assistant managers who could progress into general manager roles.
The business has also broadened its recruitment channels, including using the Breakroom platform.
Over the last probably three years, we’ve trebled the number of applications for our roles. We’re attracting many, many more people, and we’re also seeing the quality of people improve.
St Austell people director Kate Price
The group is refreshing its employer value proposition, with new recruitment website imagery and pub collateral including coasters with QR codes linking directly to summer jobs.
The business is also looking at flexible benefits for next year, including the ability to buy additional holiday and access discounted private healthcare.
The move comes after The MA Labour Report found healthcare was offered by just 3% of pub bosses, while 14% said they offered additional perks such as staff parties, flexible working hours and increased holiday allowances.
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Price said wellbeing support had become an “increasing need”, with St Austell introducing close to 60 wellbeing ambassadors over recent months. She added that operators needed a more holistic approach to employment if they wanted to make hospitality careers more sustainable.
“The onus is increasingly about what more can you give your employees, not just the money that they get and the benefits, but what culture can you give them?” she said.
“We want people to have a career, not just a job.”
