Jenny Packwood, a name synonymous with sustainability and leadership, graces our podcast with her inspiring journey. Her story begins in the agency world as a PR professional and segues into her current role as KFC's Chief Corporate Affairs and Sustainability Officer, where she is transforming the global brand. As we navigate through her two-decade career, we delve into the pivotal role she's played in embracing the shift from CSR to ESG, reflecting the changes and expectations in the business world today.
Life, however, has a way of throwing curveballs. Jenny courageously shares her personal battle when her late-husband was diagnosed with aggressive cancer, a struggle that deeply affected her mental health. The empathy and support she received during this challenging period from her KFC family has sparked a passion within her to actively address mental health issues in the workplace.
Our conversation also highlights the untapped potential and resilience of single parents in the workforce, a personal experience for Jenny. We explore how diversity, inclusion, and belonging are not just buzzwords but are essential drivers for commercial success. We examine policies that empower women in leadership roles and discuss ways to address systemic breaks to achieve true equality. The episode is a profound reflection of Jenny's journey, her values, and her pursuit of creating an inclusive and diverse workspace.
Jenny Packwood, a name synonymous with sustainability and leadership, graces our podcast with her inspiring journey. Her story begins in the agency world as a PR professional and segues into her current role as KFC's Chief Corporate Affairs and Sustainability Officer, where she is transforming the global brand. As we navigate through her two-decade career, we delve into the pivotal role she's played in embracing the shift from CSR to ESG, reflecting the changes and expectations in the business world today.
Life, however, has a way of throwing curveballs. Jenny courageously shares her personal battle when her late-husband was diagnosed with aggressive cancer, a struggle that deeply affected her mental health. The empathy and support she received during this challenging period from her KFC family has sparked a passion within her to actively address mental health issues in the workplace.
Our conversation also highlights the untapped potential and resilience of single parents in the workforce, a personal experience for Jenny. We explore how diversity, inclusion, and belonging are not just buzzwords but are essential drivers for commercial success. We examine policies that empower women in leadership roles and discuss ways to address systemic breaks to achieve true equality. The episode is a profound reflection of Jenny's journey, her values, and her pursuit of creating an inclusive and diverse workspace.
Hello and welcome to Diverse and Inclusive Leaders. This is the show where I speak with the most inspirational and thought-provoking leaders of today and unearth their unique stories of diversity and inclusion to help inspire, educate and motivate others to make the world a better place. Today, I am in person for the first time, joined by the wonderful Jenny Packwood. Jenny is the Chief Corporate Affairs and Sustainability Officer for KFC, a brand that we all know and love. Jenny's had over two decades worth of experience within corporate relations and has worked for blue chip brands which are worldwide and household names. Welcome to the show, jenny. Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:Honestly, I feel like wow, slightly intimidated by that intro. Thanks, laila. Well, honestly, you absolutely deserve it, and one of the really wonderful things, truly, that I felt when I first met you was you had this incredible warmth and candor about you, whilst at the same time being exceptionally modest. And, let's face it, someone with your experience at the C-suite level working for a brand like yours, would have every reason not to be modest, and so it's really, really nice to meet someone who's so relatable. And I guess that takes me on to my first question, which is talk to me and our audience, who know you less well than I do, about how you came to be where you are today, both personally and professionally. I know it's been a journey. Yeah, it has, and without you know like it, the journey word is a bit X-factor, isn't it? But it's definitely that. It's that for everybody. Um, yeah, I suppose.
Speaker 1:Well, I have been, as you said in the intro, over two decades working. Now I feel rather long in the tooth. I started out as a comms professional, a PR person, essentially in the agency world, and did that for about 12 years and loved it. But I never quite felt at home in the agency environment. I. You know it was fun, it was buzzy, it was exciting, there was zero work-life balance. You know that's how things were at the time.
Speaker 1:But then the opportunity came along to go in-house, which you know, at some point lots of PR people think, oh, I'll give that a go. And the opportunity came with KFC and I sort of haven't looked back. Really, I've found it so, um, I've just loved being part of a business that you can shape and influence and you can see the impact that you have day to day. I find that incredibly motivating and I've been able to also kind of, I suppose, act on and work through my passion, which is about transforming brands, and a particularly food and drink. I've always worked in the food and drink space. It's like I'm a massive foodie, love eating and drinking and I just think there's also, if you're a PR and comms person, working in the space where there are lots of meaty issues to get your teeth into, it's just always very satisfying. So food and drink is a pun excuse. The pun, yes, um, there were full of chicken puns at KFC, so I'll try not to drop too many um. But yes, the? Um.
Speaker 1:The opportunity to get stuck into some like, some challenging issues I found really exciting. And also at the time that KFC hired me, I should say KFC, uk and Ireland. Obviously it's a global business and we're talking about the, the UK and Ireland business. Um, it was sort of in the early days of businesses thinking about their impact on society and how their brand reputation interacted with that and what should a. At the time we used CSR as the, as the kind of buzzword of the day. Now it's much more about ESG or sustainability, um, so I built that first kind of framework of like what does CSR need to look like with, with NKFC um, and you know that was incredibly exciting, motivating for me.
Speaker 1:Um, and I think years down the line I've been with the business 14 years now um it's. We're not at the beginning of that journey anymore and there there has been lots of progress made. There's lots still to do, um, but it is a um. What's, what's exciting for me is that the whole business, I suspect I think, if I was honest when I first started within the brand um, the things I was kind of raising the, the challenges I was presenting and the things I was pushing to do were considered slightly wacky maybe, or sort of slightly like really, are we really going to do that?
Speaker 1:Like um, and I think now there is it's just much more mainstream and um it the sort of the argument of like oh, why should I, as a business, think about these issues? I think, broadly speaking, we're over that phase now and everyone goes okay, get it. This is not only the right thing to do, but it's also what our customers expect, it's what our employees expect and it's what our shareholders expect and it's what the government is increasingly legislating around. So you better get on the bus. So that kind of has become an easier argument to make, which is great because you expend less energy on the. This is why we need to do it, and you can put more energy on the. What are we going to do? So, yeah, that's kind of my journey, my career journey, if you like. In a nutshell, I think it's been a fantastic career journey.
Speaker 1:I know that you've studied psychology in the early days as well, and so you can see how you've really brought that human element into all of the work that you've done. And over the last decade, there has been an absolutely seismic shift between what is CSR diversity and inclusion, sustainability, esg now societal being such an aspect that all stakeholders are expected to be focusing on. And I'm sure someone as passionate as yourself has thrived from having a partially open door, a door that's easy to push on in order to then drive further innovation where things don't seem so, I suppose, hard to influence, just to actually get stuff done. I think, honestly, what has happened and I suspect this is other businesses, not just KFC UK as well, or even our global brand but what has happened is that when we first started, when I first started on the journey of building a CSR framework and building a plan, it was, even though I probably didn't admit this to myself at the time. Realistically it was not core to the business, it wasn't integrated. It was something that we thought about over on the side there but it actually wasn't embedded into the day-to-day operations or running of the business. Now I can say with much more confidence that it's absolutely built into how we think about running the business day-to-day and that reflection I suppose my career journey is at KFC a reflection of that, in that when I started I was the first person in the business doing my role and, up until very recently, our function, the function that I'd begun to build a couple of years ago, because I suppose I had a bit of a not a detour, but I spent several years focusing more purely on brand and very much the consumer brand and helping to build that story and make us a bit more cool, if you like, and a bit more relevant.
Speaker 1:When I refocused again on the need around reputation and sustainability we were part of, I started to build a team within the marketing function, which was the function that I was part of at the time, and then earlier in this year I was given a promotion to the leadership team of the UK business and my function has become its own standalone function and I think that is a reflection of the journey that sustainability in its broadest sense has taken at KFC. So it's gone from being something that was really considered. We kind of need to do this purely because we need to have some nice things to say about ourselves as a brand and to give us cover with some of the more aggressive stakeholders out there to this is a standalone function on its own that is strategically relevant, it's strategically important to the business and it has a seat at the table at the highest level. So, yeah, that's something I'm proud of. Yeah, this is really a testament to your tenacity because, if you think and as you've articulated, this was really almost the side of the death puzzle. It was a nice to have. It was something that wasn't viewed perhaps as such a serious business issue. Yeah, in just shy of a decade, with the driving capability that you've had and the influence let's call it what it is, because it does require a lot of influence in the early days and the changing kind of VUCA world quote unquote around us, this has become something that's fast forward to now become at the absolute forefront of stakeholders' lives. Yeah, you know the amount of organisations where I've gone on to the investor relations page and immediately I'm faced with what their employers are doing to ensure a sustainable environment, to ensure a positive environment for employees, and really being much more focused on the S than they were necessarily on the entire suite, which I think is really wonderful. And clearly, with your background and the early interest in psychology, it's really played into all of the things that make you what you are today.
Speaker 1:Now I wonder if you don't mind me diving a little into some of your personal experiences, because I know you're the first one to talk about how passionate deeply you are about diversity and inclusion, but not just diversity and inclusion from a holistic point of view, but diversity and inclusion from a parenthood and caring responsibilities as well as solo parenting background. I wonder whether you could talk to us a little bit about that journey. Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah, I suppose it's always true, right, that it's your own personal experiences that shape your thinking on any given topic, and my personal journey is one that has really sharpened my focus on why DE and I or whatever buzzwords you want to talk about Within KFC we talk about equity, inclusion and belonging, so that sense that everyone should feel that they can belong, no matter where they've come from.
Speaker 1:And I think for me, my journey over the last sorry, I keep saying the journey word it's really bad, it's fine. I said it about three times yeah, it's bad, I'm going to move on from that. Let's talk about evolution, evolution, yes, experiences. So I suppose I have had since 2014, 2015, life I often talk about this that my professional life really kicks into gear. I would say Like I was doing okay, I was kind of jogging along, I was doing okay, I was like good at what I did, but it was actually when I hit 40 that something shifted in me and my career went up a gear. So I do quite like talking to particularly women about the fact that, a, you don't feel like life is over when you're 40, but also that it's sort of okay to go at different paces in your life. So I took a choice when I had my children in my mid 30s, that you know I was going to go at the pace that was right for me at that point. But yes, as I say, as I turned 40, my professional life really kind of went into another gear and I just found this kind of inner confidence which was great.
Speaker 1:At the same time, my personal life completely imploded, and the big without wanting to take up hours of this podcast because it could be the headlines of that are that in 2015, my husband, darren, was diagnosed with cancer, an aggressive cancer of his neck and back of his tongue, and he we then were sort of strapped to this roller coaster ride that you don't know what wants to be on, but you can't get off, and it was an incredible, incredibly stressful time. And so we went through periods of the treatment itself. He went from being a healthy, strong, fit man in his early 40s to looking like someone who was dying of AIDS, honestly, within a few months, because of the brutality of the treatment. He had chemotherapy, he had radiotherapy and it was. It was horrendous. He wasn't able to eat. He was fed through a tube for a period of time. I mean it was awful, and the girls at the time were three and six Grace had just turned six and so life was honestly horrific and he battled that for two and a half years and then he died in May 2018.
Speaker 1:And through that time I suppose I had the responsibility. I was carrying the weight of his illness, his the responsibility of being his core, his main carer, the responsibility of the children and being their main carer and having to be fit, healthy, strong for them and to try and give them as much of a normal life as possible, through this total carnage that was going on in our home at the time, whilst working full time and just trying to keep myself sane, and so all of those pressures definitely tipped me over into not great mental health. So I but one of the things that I it's one of the reasons, I think, why I have been so loyal to KFC as a business and the people in that business is that they were incredible during this period, this very, very dark period in my life. So my then line manager of the time, meg Farron, who is now a GM, so she's a big boss in the UK was nothing short of incredible for me as a support and enabled me to. So she gave me permission at times where I really wasn't coping at all, to go. Do you know what? Do you know what you need to do now? You need to not come to work for a month. You need to sort out what's going on at home.
Speaker 1:So I had, I had, I would say about two or three chunks of time where I had to take just a chunk of time off work and of course that put pressure on my team, that put pressure on the business and there was never any sense that there was kind of compassion fatigue coming from the business or from Meg. It was just like you know what we value, you, and we are going to be here. The job will be here. You need to just take the time for the family to do what's what's needed, and I would say that KFC absolutely has that in its DNA, which is you look after your people first and people genuinely care. I think it's.
Speaker 1:There is a lot of talk of lots of businesses say we care about our people, whatever. For me, that when the rubber hits the road is like when it's really difficult to care. It's easy to care if someone's just having a bad week. It's easy to care when someone's having a bad month, when it's three years. I mean this was three years of my career where I was at times working pretty much normally and I was just managing what was going on at home and I was working full time and I was spinning those plates and there were other times where the wave would crash over me and it would take me under and I couldn't do it. And they were there when that happened and they just said don't worry, it's fine. This is like. This is more important. So that for me, was a real.
Speaker 1:So I suppose what it led me to recognize was a it gave me a huge amount of empathy for those who struggle with mental illness and because there were definitely times during that where I was tipped over the balance into depression and anxiety, that circumstantially, you know and of course there are plenty of people who suffer that that is not about the circumstances, just about their brain chemistry and how they're dealing with that. So so that gave me, you know, definitely a lot of compassion and empathy for that as an issue. And I think in general, kind of one of our affinity groups actually at work is one around mental health and you know it's really I feel quite passionately about getting that, making it socially acceptable to talk about that at work and saying you know what I've had difficult times. I've had to see the GP, I've had to see a therapist, I've had to take him to the presence or whatever, and actually make that a normal conversation as you would about anything else, as you would if you had the flu or a cold or something else which impaired your ability to deliver at work. So I think that says there's that element of it, and I suppose the other element of that personal experience that I went through was that obviously it resulted in me being a single parent, or a solo parent really.
Speaker 1:There is no one else. You know, like the buck stops entirely with me at home, and that has been such an eye-opener for me because I have been a co-parent and it's hard enough being a co-parent right and working full time. We all know what that's like. It's madness. It is a constant juggle and between you you're constantly passing the baton, you're constantly whose job is more important at this moment than whatever? You know, we've all been there. So I don't.
Speaker 1:You know, being a working parent, particularly to younger children, is incredibly challenging. And then the solo parenting and that just honestly takes it to a whole new level and what I realized as I grappled with how I was going to manage life working full time because I love my job and my job gives me. My job makes me a nicer person because it inspires me, it stimulates me, it makes me grow as a person. I know there will be lots of people who might think, well, maybe if your husband had died and you had two young children, you maybe should have scaled your career back or whatever. But I genuinely that never crossed my mind, partly, as I say, just because I love my job and I'm very motivated by it and it's very validating for me, but also because I am now the sole breadwinner, and that is, I have entire financial responsibility for me and those two girls and I want to set them up for success, and because I also want to be a great role model for them, because I'm a mother to two daughters and I want them to see what women can achieve when they put their mind to it.
Speaker 1:So, yes, but I think, then, that for me, I suppose my lens on where you say you talk about what diversity and inclusion means to you and you've got your very personal take on it as the adopted child of two white British people Mine is the lens of someone who has struggled with their mental health and, thankfully, has now come through the other side, and also someone who is a solo parent and who works full time, so they're almost more what you might call non visible kind of diversity issues, and I think that is, I think, so often, people who look in from the outside on the world of diversity, inclusion, and it can think it's about the visible tick box, like do you have enough people of you know a different you know, do you have enough employees from different ethnic origins in your, in your workforce? But diversity has to go beyond that. It has to be about diversity of experience, diversity of background and diversity of thinking, actually diversity of thought. So so yeah that that for me has been such a learning curve on how do we and what drives me now what one of the big drivers for me at work is how do we make life easier for single parents? There are something like I should have checked these figures before I came on this, but there is something like 1.8 million single parents, single parents in the UK and about I think nine out of 10 of them are women. They are carrying a huge burden. But I suppose one of my missions now is how do we get I want to kind of change the change the tone of the conversation around being a single parent. I think they we have such a bad image in the media, we have such a bad reputation with generally seen as slightly feckless and reckless. It's like how have you managed to lose a partner, or you lose a husband and you know, are you sponging off the state? And there's just a. There's generally negativity around the concept of single parents and I want to change that and I want to champion how brilliant single parents can be and a lot of what I feel about single parents.
Speaker 1:I put in a really funny I put it and it's how we connected. I put it in a LinkedIn post I did earlier in the year. Was it earlier in the year? Was it last year? I can't even remember now. It was earlier in the year and you know what. It was so touching, but it was also really direct and I think that's exactly what the world needs right now is less fluffiness and more candle.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, thank you, but what I articulated in that was why I think single parents actually make great employees, and there is there are lots of reasons, but I think, in a nutshell, we get shit done because we do not have time to muck around, we can't sweat the small stuff, it's just crack on. I think we have buckets of empathy because we have very often seen the tougher side of life and, yeah, I just think there is. We're brilliant at juggling right, so there's definitely that as well. So I think there is something about having that, all of that responsibility on your shoulders that makes you just like not muck about and just get on with things. Well, firstly, honestly, thank you so so much for sharing such a deeply personal story, jenny.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it and I know that everyone who is listening to the podcast will appreciate it and join me in saying that you epitomize that of a real model, not just a role model, a real model, but you've lived it. You have walked the walk, you talk the talk, but you shine, as you know a beacon does on showing that you can do this even at your very lowest. You've risen the crest of the wave and you've turned all of the pain and the suffering into power to show that not only can your girls do it as future leaders, but you also inspire a whole collective of generations in the workforce who may relate to all of the different areas of diversity and to your point. I think we so too much think the diversity is what sits on the surface level. If we and we all have stereotypes, we all have biases and if we weren't having this conversation and we just had a still image of you we had your title on LinkedIn, you know, corporate cheese big brand we could quite easily get the wrong idea without actually scratching below the surface and realizing that what you do matters. And, frankly, when you talk about that post which resonates so deeply and I reached out and commented because of that post, you know, it just demonstrates that actually employers are getting loyalty, they're getting hard work, they're getting resilience, they're getting someone who's got another level of empathy, they're getting someone who's a real people, person. They're getting someone who, in many instances also doesn't necessarily have a choice.
Speaker 1:No, the commitment is there. Certainly, exactly, yeah, and I think, well, thank you, layla. It's very kind of you to say sorry, I'm conscious I kind of like waffled on for quite a long time. No, no, you have not, but I do think you're absolutely right in saying that, like on one level, people might look at me and go white middle class woman, look at her privilege, and I do. I'm obviously, I am very aware I either are. I am privileged in many ways and I think one of the things I'm very conscious of and that I'm trying to drive some action around within the business is that I am lucky enough to be able to afford, to be able to afford the kind of support at home that enables me to do my job Right. You know, it is much harder if you are earlier on in your career to be able to and this happened to you earlier in your career and this that would be a much harder barrier to overcome, because the cost of childcare in this country is cripplingly high.
Speaker 1:I'm aware of the fact that within our restaurants, within KFC, we have single parents in our restaurants, we have working mums in our restaurants and we've one of the things we're trying to tackle through our female equality affinity group which is called Wolfpack. We are really specifically targeting our restaurants and going. Actually, we do not have currently the right balance of restaurant managers. We have many more male restaurant managers in a thousand restaurants that we have up and down the UK and Ireland than women, and that's something that we're actively trying to change. So that's looking up. What are the policies, the processes that we need to put in place to support women, to make them feel like they can be in those roles and also just to showcase, because we've actually got some brilliant female leaders at restaurant manager level. How can we showcase them so they become really good role models for other women coming up through the business? So it's trying to take those, that personal experience and that personal passion, and actually turn it into something that's going to drive meaningful change at scale. But you're also doing it in a very practical and pragmatic way because ultimately, we know that the world is not equitable. We know that it is about addressing systematic breaks in the system and also those barriers in order to allow the playing field to be truly equal. And so to do what you've done with Wolfpack which actually I'd love you to tell our listeners about Wolfpack I think that's superb and the need to be proactive is key.
Speaker 1:I often speak to individuals and I take great joy actually in kind of influencing, persuading or some might say coercing individuals into arm wrestling, hand behind the back kind of situation. Why diversity, inclusion, belonging, equity is great for business. And often people will say, oh, yeah, but eventually it'll happen. My kids don't see color, blah, blah, blah, and that's all very well and good, but without the interventions it will be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more years until we see everything that gender parity. And that's not even considering all the other layers of the onion, as I see diversity. But you've got to tell me about Wolfpack, so tell me about Hatch as well. So, just before I go on to that, so tell you about Hatch, or tell you about Wolfpack.
Speaker 1:But I think business leaders are missing a trick. So diversity shouldn't be an inclusion. Isn't like? Oh, the sub box I have to take to make sure that my shareholders are happy or that you know we're we fit certain, you know, you know like, yes, the box ticking exercise is genuinely good for business Because there is so much evidence to show that diverse teams make better decisions. Diverse businesses are more successful. You are missing out on talent If you do not try and shift that. It's just masses of untucked talent there if you don't open your eyes to it.
Speaker 1:So that's kind of like my soapbox. It's like this isn't, this isn't like. You can actually have quite a hard nosed business commercial lens on it and it makes sense. Nothing about doing good? Yeah, absolutely nothing. If anyone said to hard nosed commercial individual they didn't care about doing business for good, yeah, and you said you can be 35% more profitable, they do exactly, yeah, usually just so happens that you know, and I truly believe this we as a society are not utilizing diversity and inclusion as a commercial lever with which we should. And right now, within you know, within well, government and frankly you know the kind of well that the shambles that is, you know, chaos in Westminster right now and everything else we really need to be looking to more innovative ways to drive commercial value to business and society, because our future generations will not be able to thrive or have the opportunities that they deserve otherwise. Yeah, totally agree, cool, okay, so hatch.
Speaker 1:So I suppose hatch is if we're talking diversity and inclusion and belonging and like, as I say, what, how we talk about it in KFC is equity, inclusion and belonging, eib. Every business has got to have their own buzzword right for this. We have a program that we have piloted this year in collaboration with UK youth, who are an amazing youth charity and they basically coordinate youth work across the UK and we've partnered with them to really to try and address social mobility and the issue of young people being left behind in many communities across the UK. So we all know that the pandemic kind of exacerbated the inequalities in our society and actually young people looking all the data young people suffer that the worst and we're a massive youth employer. So this we're talking about. You know, sustainability ESG has to be about being like just changing your business practices to make them to make your business ultimately more have a more positive impact on the world and make it integrated to your business.
Speaker 1:We're one of the UK's biggest youth employers. Already we've got 2728,000 employees up and down the country and about 65% of them are under 25. So we're already like we know how to employ young people, we know what they need and basically what we were seeing was that young people, particularly post pandemic, have been hit with this kind of like. So many, so many negatives of the kind of areas of the country which were more deprived in the first place got increasingly deprived through the pandemic. Those young people who were either socioeconomically disadvantaged or they maybe were growing up in care or all of those things which give you barriers to leapfrog over in life anyway, had been kind of shunted further down the pack. And they hadn't had. It was a whole cohort of young people, a whole generation that had missed out on two years of schooling pretty much in and out. All of the things like youth clubs et cetera had been shut down. So those vital skills around social interaction, confidence, et cetera, had been lost as well.
Speaker 1:And we had Yum. At a global level, yum is our parent company, which also owns Taco Bell and Pizza Hut had got this big drive around tackling inequality and trying to drive equality of opportunity. And our way of looking at that in the UK was saying, okay, we need to address this issue around young people being left behind, youth unemployment et cetera. And so Hatch came about through that insight and it was about trying to tackle the issue that lots of young people want to work but they don't have the experience to land a job, all the confidence et cetera, but you can't get a job without having the work experience that they won't give you work experience because you haven't had a job. So this is kind of a negative cycle.
Speaker 1:So we worked with UK youth to design a program which was basically about pre-employment training, so getting young people who are, frankly, they've got some disadvantages they're not gonna just walk in and get a job giving them as they go through seven modules that build their confidence, that teach them what they need to know before they even go and get work experience, and then they are offered a four week placement with KFC or indeed another business. So we piloted this in Manchester this year. We had 80 young people go through the program. We partnered with UK youth and then we had the graduation ceremony actually in November and it was amazing to see the impact that going through this program had on the confidence of those young people that they'd gone into work experience. Several of them, like the restaurant managers, have gone. I just wanna employ this person now. I don't even wanna give them an interview, because we said everyone who went through the program was guaranteed an interview at the end. We couldn't guarantee everyone a job, but everyone would get an interview and actually many of them just went straight into jobs. Others went to jobs somewhere else. But what we're now trying to do is to scale this up so that we are using our scale as a large employer of young people for good. So next year we're hoping four or 500 young people will go through this program and then by 2030, the goal is that 30% of our intake, of our recruitment, will be young people going through the Hatch program.
Speaker 1:It's incredibly difficult to do. There are lots of barriers Like we are calling on the government to make it easier for employers to do the right thing, by young people. But it is also like this for me is like literally like ESG and action. It is like how do you take what you do as a business anyway and just pivot it so that it actually has a positive impact on the world and society? And the biggest area we can have an impact is through how we employ people, like because we're a big employer. So, yeah, that's hatching a nutshell. That is absolutely tremendous and I can see your face light up when you're talking about this. It's like, it's like Katnip, oh, I love it, I love it, I'm obsessed, so excited.
Speaker 1:And, you know, also demonstrates that diversity is not just one single class tier. Do you know? You're addressing social mobility here. You're looking at youth, you're looking at unemployment, you're giving opportunity, which ultimately drives this whole notion Exactly. I think increasingly and there's been a brilliant program on the BBC recently by Amal Rajan's been presenting it which is breaking the class ceiling and actually, I think social mobility we should do another podcast on this, but I think actually like that, the social mobility, the socioeconomic disadvantage that people face, is a huge barrier and it's an invisible barrier in many ways and that is something that hatch is absolutely at the forefront of tackling, and I think it's something that we all need Like. It's almost like the last element of diversity and inclusion that we haven't really properly got into as a society, I think, yet. Well, it's invisible and it's a wrapper around everything. If you think about classes, like Privilege, there is a scale across the board.
Speaker 1:Well, jenny, thank you so so much for joining me today on the show. It's been an absolute joy and a privilege to have you. Oh, thank you, I've really enjoyed it. Thank you, layla. Well, I hope you've learned as much as I have on the Diverse and Inclusive Leaders podcast show today as I have, and I'm sure that you'll agree.
Speaker 1:Jenny has been an absolute marvelous guest. Not only does she speak with candor, she speaks with incredible authenticity and lived experience. If you have been affected by any of the issues in today's show, make sure that you reach out to the team or I, but make sure you also listen back, share this podcast with anyone that you think will benefit. All of the podcast notes will be at the end of today's show in our show notes, and you can find us on your favorite podcast app Apple, spotify, podcast radio, to name but a few Until next week. Make sure you look after yourself. My name is Layla McKenzie-Dallas. This is Diverse and Inclusive Leaders podcast show brought to you by Darglobal. Make sure you hit subscribe, visit us at wwwdarglobalorg or slash podcast. See you on the night.