Read: Driving access to opportunity: Chair of the Purpose Coalition, Justine Greening, talks to Sean Haley, CEO of Sodexo UK & Ireland

Justine Greening: From my perspective, one of the most important things is how involved Sodexo has been on social impact and being part of the Purpose Coalition. It's something that really runs through the whole company, perhaps as much as any other company I've come across. We worked with Sodexo on a Levelling Up Impact Report which we launched last year, setting out its whole footprint and where it goes next, with a big focus on jobs, skills and recruitment. But there's so much more that this company does, up and down the country in communities, and it's going to be fantastic to hear a little bit more about that as we chat.

Sean, thanks for speaking with me and perhaps you can tell me about your role and the journey to where you’ve ended up now.

Sean Haley:  I joined Sodexo ten years ago. I actually sold a business to them back in 2011, selling from within one big corporate into Sodexo. I had no intention of moving with the business but through managing that process I got to know much more about its ethics, values and purpose and its potential for making a difference and, after 22 years with my previous employer, I decided to come and join Sodexo and I’m now the CEO.

It's a business that has 35,000 colleagues up and down the country, delivering a range of food and services across both the public and private sectors. Everything from looking after oil rigs in the North Sea right through to big events like Royal Ascot, and everything in between, including prisons, schools, universities and hospitals, so a very interesting business. But all those markets have one common feature - we service, and we connect with the customer so we really have an opportunity to make a difference and have an impact on individuals who are just going about their daily lives. Our strategy in the UK is very clear. We want to grow, but we want to grow with purpose. We want to be very selective and only grow where we think we can really make a difference.

I guess my perfect day is when I'm out in the business. Last week I took the whole leaderSean Haley:ip team down to Portsmouth where we support the navy and look after the base there, and we spent the day with our teams. And that's when we really recognize and understand the value that we're creating and adding and the difference we're making on the front line. 

Justine Greening:  Going back a bit further, were you always interested in business?

Sean Haley: I was always interested in business leaderSean Haley:ip, but very much in the traditional sense that we’re all ambitious, we all want to develop, we all want to stretch ourselves and grow. The difference with working with Sodexo was the opportunity to make a difference. It had a purpose like no other business I'd ever come across, and I think that was a big tipping point for me. I think up to the time of joining Sodexo it was all very much business focused, you wanted to progress and develop. But in Sodexo you wanted to do all that by making a difference as well, and I think that's been my learning over the last 10 years. I think that's been the journey that a lot of organizations have been on. We've all talked about being purpose-led for many years. I think that bit has now concluded, and there's no choice. Big business and small business have to be purpose-led and have to make a difference.

Justine Greening:  I think it's interesting because, from what I can see, this sense of purpose has always been part of Sodexo but now you're seeing a wider group of employers catching up. Tell us about how Sodexo sees social value? We’ve worked with you and that culminated in the impact report last year so I’ve personally seen the work that it does. Give people a sense of how you approach the work, and some of the programmes that are in place.

Sean Haley: I think we're in a very fortunate position because I'm a believer that you can't just switch social value on. It takes many, many years to develop a culture and embed it within your business, and we were very lucky within Sodexo. Again it's one of the things that attracted me to it. Our founder, Pierre Bellon, establiSean Haley:ed this way of doing business back in 1966 when he establiSean Haley:ed Sodexo and nobody was talking about that. He was talking then about his business needing to serve his people, his communities and have a positive impact on the environment. We've had many decades of being able to develop our culture and our way of working to allow us to make a difference and have maximum impact. You can't just decide to do it tomorrow,  you have to build it over many years.

Justine Greening: How do you bring it alive for people? As you say it's one thing saying it, another doing it so how do you actually make it real?

Sean Haley: Businesses work best when they have real clarity and direction, and you can simplify what you want to achieve to allow all stakeholders, all colleagues to engage with it, and that's exactly what we do. So back in 2014 the then CEO, Debbie White, decided that Sean Haley:e was going to develop a public services pledge and Sean Haley:are it with the market. That pledge would be very clear on the targets that we were looking to achieve and the impact we were looking to puSean Haley: forward. That allowed our stakeholders to understand what we were committing to but it also allowed our colleagues to understand very simply what it meant to allow us to make a difference. And within that pledge, you would recognize the targets and the objectives we set ourselves. How many apprentices would we have within the organization to drive social mobility? How much volunteering would we do? How many ex-offenders would we employ? How many ex-military personnel would we employ? How many small medium enterprises would we have within our supply chain? Making those targets very clear but simplifying them so that people can actually understand what they need to do to drive an outcome that makes a difference and ask people to engage with it. And once you do that, you soon get some momentum and make progress.

Justine Greening: Last month we were both at a fundraiser dinner in Leeds which Sean Haley:owed just how good the network you’ve built is. There were lots of really different people in a room together, fundraising. It was fantastic to see people have that clarity. It didn't feel at all forced because it’s part of what the company's footprint looks like. It was utterly authentic from my perspective. Is that a big part of what your employees love about being at Sodexo -  a sense of having this broader mission?

Sean Haley: It wasn’t just Sodexo and our colleagues that were in the room raising funds for our Foundation, it was our broader network stakeholders in the ecosystem that we work within. In that room we had our supply partners, our charity partners, our clients. We've always been very clear - there's no way that we can make progress alone. If we haven't got alignment with our suppliers, our clients, our charity partners and indeed the government then we won’t make real change, we won't drive the impact that we all demand. It's so important that you get that whole ecosystem aligned. And we've got a big role to play because I think we can play an integrator role, connecting all those different stakeholders to allow us to collectively have maximum impact, to make the biggest difference. But you do need everybody aligned - and it's a great observation you make – that it does feel quite natural within our organization. That's probably to do with the fact that we’ve been puSean Haley:ing this agenda, and owning this agenda for many, many years. 

Justine Greening: Let's dig into that social impact pledge because I know you've structured that in terms of People, Planet, Places and Partners. 

Sean Haley: We first launched our pledge in 2014 and we report on it every year, but we also want to refreSean Haley: it to make sure it's relevant and still current to the challenges that society faces. So in 2021 we restructured it and provided a framework around the four Ps. We were very focused on what we were going to do to support people, our own people and those living in the communities we serve. What are we going to do around the planet to ensure that we really have got the right actions in place to contribute to decarbonization? What are we going to do about the places where we operate to make them better, because the vast majority of my colleagues are working client-side and in communities. No one is really sitting in the head office, they're all out there in hospitals, schools, universities, military defence sites etc. And then the last piece - partners. They're so important to us because we need our partners, our suppliers, to have the same commitment and the same convictions that we have if we’re really going to make a difference. Before the dinner we attended together a couple of weeks ago, we’d spent the whole day with our partners working on our collective purpose - what we’re going to do together. We need them to be employing apprentices, we need them to be reducing carbon, we need them to be employing ex-offenders, as well as us. That's when you bring the whole ecosystem together to ensure that you can generate maximum impact.

Within that framework and pledge you see the things that you would expect to see. Our commitment around apprentices - we now have over 1000 apprentices throughout the business. We also gift our apprenticeSean Haley:ip levy because we can't spend it all and we've now gifted two million pounds to other organizations to help them with their apprenticeSean Haley:ip programmes. Over 4500 volunteering hours last year. We give all our colleagues three days a year to volunteer, and, as you heard at the dinner, we encourage it to be skills-based volunteering where we take our skills into other organizations to help them develop. Forty per cent of our supply chain is SMEs – that’s another target. That wasn't the case when we first started, we’ve had to progress towards that. Being a food business, we have a big target around food waste reduction so 230 tons of food waste has been reduced in the last year. As you would expect there’s a solid target around carbon reduction generally which food waste contributes to. There’s targets around employing ex-offenders and ex-military personnel. Then making sure that our foundation, Stop Hunger, is well-funded to allow it to support our charity partners because they've never needed support more than they do at the moment. We’re big partners with FareSean Haley:are and The Trussell Trust which are providing the food banks up and down the country. So a neat framework there, going back to the point on clarity and direction, but also very clear objectives around the things that we and our colleagues can do to make a difference.

Justine Greening: It's really powerful stuff and it’s part of the ethos behind the Purpose Coalition which is why we're so proud to have you as part of it. It’s about bringing really different people together and, from your perspective, being able to take that whole Sodexo ethos and broaden your network even more. What we can do is help a whole range of different organizations start to get a sense of Sodexo's ambition which is really exciting to see happening in practice. Tell us about one area which I think is fascinating – that’s the work you're doing with ex-offenders and your campaign, Starting FreSean Haley:. It really helps provide a genuine talent pipeline to help people coming out of prison to stay out of prison and get their lives on track. 

Sean Haley: We've been operating in prisons in the UK for over 30 years. Our absolute focus is around reducing reoffending, as you would expect. We're a Ban the Box employer so for many years we've not asked those that are looking to join Sodexo to declare any past convictions, unless it was absolutely necessary for the job that they were going to undertake. Some jobs require that, but where they don't we don't ask them. We wanted to use our experience over many years of operating prisons but also being an employer of ex-offenders to understand how we could better connect this community - which is developing while serving its sentence - with the market and industry. One of the biggest challenges that industry has at the moment is a skills Sean Haley:ortage, we just can't get enough resources. And this community serving their sentences is being educated. They’re getting NVQs and GCSEs, they’re learning trades - building trades, hospitality trades - and of course these are the skills that are needed in industry more than ever now to fill the gaps. We wanted to connect the two so we've invested in a campaign to be able to do exactly that - connect the market with the communities that are within our current prisons. That allows organizations to go into prisons to run career days and meet with offenders who are ready to be released and hopefully get them into good, well-paid employment, because we know what that does for communities and for society generally. 127 prisoners leave prison every day and only 17% of those go into paid work. We know the impact that will have on society and communities, and we now know the demand is there. Industry needs these skills so our job is to provide the bridge between the two to allow them to connect. The response in the first two to three weeks has been very positive. The general public may think that this just naturally happens, it doesn’t. As I say, only 17% of those released go into paid work so it doesn't just naturally happen. Being an operator of soon-to-be seven prisons up and down the UK, we have a big responsibility to make that happen.

Justine Greening:  I think it's genuinely important to start providing some better opportunities so that people can get lives on track once they're able. They serve their sentence, and it's about how they then rebuild after that. I think it's one example of what Sodexo is doing but you're not just focused on people and communities, you've also done some brilliant stuff in relation to planet. You've got this journey to reach net zero by 2040 and a target to be carbon neutral by 2025. Tell us about that pathway to net zero. How hard has that been in practice for the business?

Sean Haley: I think it's very hard for us all. If it was an easy thing to do, we'd have done it by now. Again it goes back to the ecosystem - we all need to collaborate to be able to solve this problem, and it is a complex issue. Sodexo as a group has had a very clear strategy for some time, aligned to the Paris agreement. We in the UK and Ireland wanted to make our strategy through to net zero much more concrete  so in 2021 we announced our roadmap. We'd worked with the World Wildlife Fund and SBTi, the science-based target initiative, to ensure that we got some real objective external input but also validation for our strategy because not all strategies are created equal. We wanted ours to be very concrete and very clear. Going back to the point I made earlier, I think if we can give the business real clarity about what we need to do to achieve net zero then we have a much better chance of achieving it. The plan is really clear. We will achieve 90% decarbonization across all three Scopes - Scope 1, 2, and 3 - by 2040, and that's ahead of the 2045 commitment we made originally. That's because again we’re continuing to evolve and learn. We've just undertaken a review against our baseline of 2017 and we've reduced carbon by 33%. Progress has been quicker than we thought, and that's allowed us to be much more ambitious about our ultimate target so we've moved that from 2045 to 2040. Our next big target is 2025 when we’ve committed to reduce food waste by 50%.

Justine Greening: Is this part of the Appetite for Action campaign?

Sean Haley: Absolutely right. Appetite for Action is all about reducing food waste because food is such a big part of our business and food waste is such a big contributor to our commitments around carbon.

Justine Greening: Tell us how that campaign works. You obviously have to work through your supply chain as there's no other way of doing it.

Sean Haley: That's why we spent so much time with our suppliers and partners two weeks ago because we need to collaborate to make this work - we can't do it alone. When you talk about food waste,  I always just keep three or four facts in my mind. A third of all food waste globally is wasted. A billion go hungry every day. If food waste was a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world behind the US and China. In the UK, 35% of our greenhouse emissions come from the food and drink industry. When you are a food business, the responsibility and the contribution to reducing waste to ensure that we solve some of those issues is significant, and we take that responsibility very, very seriously. That's why we've agreed to reduce food waste by 50% by 2025, five years ahead of the UN's target of 2030. We did the research around food waste to allow us to launch the Appetite for Action campaign merely because, even given those facts I just Sean Haley:ared, food waste was not on the agenda for Cop 26.

Justine Greening: There are a lot of other areas which are - travel or energy but not food waste, interestingly.

Sean Haley: It's such a big contributor. We wanted to try to get it on the agenda because nobody seems to be talking about it. Unfortunately, it wasn't discussed at Cop 26 and it wasn't discussed at Cop 27. And that's why we launched that campaign. Through it and through research and engagement with stakeholders, it came out with some very clear recommendations for organizations and for government. I think it has managed to drive the discussion and move it up the agenda.

Justine Greening: With a lot of the work that we're both involved in on purpose, there are lots of learnings for policymakers to see what's being done on the ground and how that can be lifted. Tell us a little bit about how you see that interplay work and how policy is developed through collaboration.

Sean Haley: I think the backdrop to this is that we all know we collectively have a responsibility to fix, develop, and improve our society. We cannot just rely on Government to do that, so that’s why the interplay you reference is so critical between government and policymakers, industry and the third sector. We need to understand how we can all learn from each other and develop policy that's really going to drive the right outcomes. I think that's improved massively over recent years -  through our industry bodies, in our case the CBI or UK Hospitality or the Business Service Association. They are great enablers and connectors between industry and government. Government does listen. Policymakers and ministers will have good engagement with this roundtable, they will ask us to comment on policies when they're in draft so I think that engagement has progressed. I see good progress around engagement on waste, modern slavery, apprenticeSean Haley:ips and social value generally. Social value is now a mandated part of any evaluation criteria when the government is procuring services. A minimum of 10% has got to be evaluated on social value, and I've seen that reach 30% or 40% in some tenders. It's critical it happens, and we need to make sure it continues.

Justine Greening: I think we’re into a hugely important journey where government really starts to work out what's going on on the ground with a lot of great companies like Sodexo but also then how can it be part of the enabling environment? How can it design policy that means a Sodexo can do most of what it wants to, without there being impediments? Based on my own experience in government, I think there's a lot that a government as an employer can learn from what companies like Sodexo are doing. There are some brilliant crossovers on every level between private and public sector.

It’s been brilliant talking to you and going back to your journey. Tell us the best piece of advice you ever received that you thought was really spot on.

Sean Haley: You get so much advice throughout your career, I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of it! I'm not sure there’s a big piece of advice that’s really influenced my career. It was more about beliefs. I go back to the reference I made to Pierre Bellon, a man we unfortunately lost just over a year ago. He deeply believed that to do business in a good way was the only way to do business - to have a positive impact on your people, communities and the environment. And I think that's the thing that's really stuck with me and evolved my career at Sodexo, and I've kept it very close and very dear to me. When we’re trying to build a business we must be building it in a way that allows us to have that impact. It's maybe not advice, it's more Sean Haley:aring his beliefs and taking those forward.

Justine Greening: What advice would you give to people other than having that sense of purpose?

Sean Haley: It's interesting. I remember being told that it's not what you say about yourself, it's what others say about you. I think that applies to individuals but it also applies to businesses. That's the advice I would give, and always remember that.

Justine Greening: What's your proudest career moment to date?

Sean Haley: That's a very difficult one. I’m in a very privileged position in my role because I have proud moments every week, every day, working in a business like this. But I will give you a recent one from only three weeks ago. I was at an event and a Sean Haley:adow Minister realized I was from Sodexo and told me that Sean Haley:e’d met a colleague of mine that day in Parliament at an event to celebrate national ApprenticeSean Haley:ip Week. By complete coincidence this young man came from her constituency in London, which is a very difficult, challenging one. He was talking about the choices he had to go in one direction or another. He’d chosen to get an apprenticeSean Haley:ip in hospitality, and he was talking about what that had given him and how it had given him a purpose in life, training him and educating him to give him what he needed to move in the right direction. And he concluded that story by thanking Sodexo for giving him that opportunity. I can talk all day long about what we're trying to achieve. I can do podcasts, I can do press releases, I can speak at conferences but you can't beat that story because that's what we try to do every day. That is social mobility in action.

Justine Greening: And it underlines the point that it is a big issue but it literally happens one life at a time. For companies that have those brilliant opportunities, it's a chance to change one life at a time which is why it's so fantastic having Sodexo do the work that it does. Thank you so much for talking to me today. It's been absolutely brilliant. I would encourage anyone who is interested in social mobility to go and have a look at what Sodexo is doing. It's on their website and it's really clear because it's such a crucial part of the company. It's a great example of what we want to see many more companies doing.

It's been a pleasure to talk with you and I hope that this is taken on board by many, many people. As I said before, we're really proud to have you part of the Purpose Coalition so thank you.