Businesses - love thy neighbour and you’ll earn respect and win allies

Do you know your neighbour’s name? If so, you find yourself in the minority in the UK.

According to a recent report, 51% of those with neighbours admit they don’t know their first names. Less than a third would call their neighbours ‘friends’ and 13% of people say they distrust, dislike or deliberately avoid their next-door neighbours. Unsurprisingly, this number rises for 18-24 year olds.

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this is a worrying trend. How can we form coherent and supportive communities if we don’t know and don’t care about those we share them with? This is a question that not only individuals but also every business should be asking themselves.

How can we build strong relationships with our neighbours? How can we play an active and constructive part in the neighbourhood? How can we be friends? And how can we make sure we communicate the benefits we bring to a community?

At KFC, it’s a question we take very seriously. We and our franchise partners go out of our way — and far beyond the legal demands of the Localism Act 2011 — to be good partners and to listen to and consult with local communities.

We are the go-to source of development expertise within our global parent company Yum! and our flexible approach to tenure, deal structure and design comes as a surprise to the many international development experts we host. In their own markets, they face far fewer of the hoops we all have to jump through to win planning consent — and they’re impressed by our willingness to listen and adapt to address potential ‘deal breakers’ here in the UK.

What underpins our ingrained flexibility is the commercial reality that the customer — and the community — is paramount.

Clear communication

For any company, flexibility and clear communication to customers, whether landowners, funds, councillors or residents groups, is vital. Stating clearly what you can, will and won’t be flexible on earns respect, wins allies and sets expectations. And your stakeholders will appreciate your candour.

But what the business has said and what the community hears can sometimes be two very different things. Myths and assumptions can easily arise. A recent conversation with a senior investment director of a national surveying practice revealed he’d never heard of Yum! and was unaware we have successfully opened over 300 drive-thru restaurants.

This was alarming coming from someone who routinely gives advice to funds on asset management and leisure and retail park purchases.

So this got us thinking: if we haven’t communicated who we are and what we bring to the table for neighbourhoods to a senior executive in the development community as well as we thought we had, how big a communication task remains with councillors and local communities throughout the UK?

To address this, we have recently overhauled our development website and created a Good Neighbour Guide. Simply going through this exercise has sharpened our focus and provides the tools to dispel the myths and allay any concerns. It also helped us explain the pride we have in our solid track record of openings, job creation and community engagement with our stakeholders.

As part of this initiative, we have outlined a series of Community Commitments that we make wherever we have a KFC restaurant. They include our focus on creating career opportunities and training for local people, a partnership with Barnardo’s to help young people into work and working to reduce our carbon footprint.

As well as facilitating an open and honest dialogue with our customers, this is a vital business tool for us.

In our industry, compromise is too often seen as weakness. But a willingness to actively engage and adapt pays dividends — we have just won two appeals thanks to our ability to be flexible. Facts can win through if you listen and communicate with good heart and clarity.

Taking time to talk and compromise makes great commercial sense. And now I’m off to introduce myself to the neighbours…

Paula MacKenzie is chief finance and development officer at KFC UK and Ireland