People & Culture as a Scaling Engine

Culture at Scale Has to be Intentional

Grind feels like a brand that would be heavy on culture. How did the values come about?

Grind has always had a strong culture, shaped by the founder, the leadership team and the people who joined early on. But as the business grows and more people join, you have to become more deliberate about protecting and scaling what makes that culture special. It wasn’t that we didn’t know who we were. Agreeing on how to talk about it, that was the hard part.

The result was five values that feel distinctly Grind:

• Challengers
• Purposeful
• Relentless
• Collaborators
• Grounded

They’re now embedded into recruitment and performance, not as a tick-box, but as a genuine lens for what great looks like at Grind.

The Shift the People Function Has to Make

How has the HR function itself evolved as the business has scaled?

Historically, the function was focused on supporting a fast-moving hospitality business, and rightly so. As Grind expanded into a broader omni-channel brand, the remit naturally evolved to include more strategic partnership, planning and organisational design. We centralised people operations, payroll, compliance, contracts, so our People and Culture Business Partners could focus on what the business actually needs from them: sitting shoulder to shoulder with leadership, talking about strategy, structure and how we get from A to Z.

Balancing Strategy and Reality

In a business growing this fast, how far ahead can you realistically plan?

I used to plan on two-year horizons. In an agile business like this, plans become outdated too quickly. I’ve learned that you have to run two tracks simultaneously, a longer-term view of the capabilities, leadership behaviours and culture you’re building towards, and a much shorter-term focus on the operational fundamentals that let everything else function. Getting the calibration right between those two is really hard, and I haven’t always gotten it right. But we’re in a good place with it now, with the full expectation that in six months, it will need to shift again.

What Leadership Needs to Look Like Next

What does leadership need to look like as Grind moves into its next chapter?

Our leaders are both strategists and operators, by design and by necessity. We value that. It keeps leadership grounded. But what got you here won’t get you there, and that applies to leadership models as much as anything else. We’re at an exciting point where we can start to define what leadership should look like for the next chapter of Grind.

At its best, HR is not there to slow growth down or add unnecessary processes. It exists to help ambitious businesses keep growing in the right way, protecting what makes them special while building the structure and clarity needed for what comes next. The result is not a different business. It is a stronger, more scalable version of the same one.

• HR Transformation and Business Partnering
• Organisational Culture