Inside Fortnum & Mason's workforce overhaul

Fortnum & Mason has been trading since 1707, and very little about the business has needed to change in that time. So when Sean Ghouse, Director of UK Retail at F&M, and James Blackbrough, Head of Retail at F&M, sat down to talk about how the retailer modernised its workforce planning, the conversation kept circling back to one idea: this wasn't about disruption. It was about giving people back their time, and the story of how they got there is a genuinely good one. 

Three Hundred Years of Tradition. One Quiet Workforce Revolution. That's the story Fortnum & Mason brought to The Shift 2026, Rotageek's customer event, a session dedicated to the honest, unpolished realities of workforce management today. 

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The problem hiding in plain sight

Change without disruption

What actually changed for everyone

What's next: growing the craft

The takeaways

The problem hiding in plain sight

When Sean Ghouse joined Fortnum & Mason, he asked a simple question: how does each store actually manage its schedules? The answer surprised him.

"I discovered not only were we using Excel, which pretty much everyone was, but it was different templates, different formats, different colours, different codes. It didn't make sense across every floor, let alone across every single store."

The inconsistency went deeper than formatting. Notice periods for rotas varied from a week to just a few days depending on the store, which meant staff couldn't plan their lives around their schedules. Managers, meanwhile, found themselves rewriting rotas at the last minute so often that the team had a name for it: "version 5.0 of the rota."

 

James Blackbrough, Head of Retail at Piccadilly, remembers the same frustration from a different angle, watching the business grow while the tools underneath it stayed stuck: 

"We had different stores, some sending rotas out with a week's notice, some with just days' notice. It's like, how can we align and bring all that together so that it's fair across everybody, and it actually works properly for the business, the store, and the team?"

Fortnum & Mason today spans its Piccadilly flagship, regional stores, and a team based at Heathrow, bringing together some of the most experienced and specialised retail teams in the UK. Any change had to work across all of it without flattening the real differences between, say, a Piccadilly floor team and the airport operation.

Change without disruption

That's largely why the team didn't force a single, big-bang rollout. Instead, the approach had four strands running alongside each other, each one deliberately low-risk before the next began: 

• Aligning without flattening. Scheduling rules were harmonised across stores, while still listening to how individual locations, like Heathrow, genuinely operate differently. 
• Leading with transparency. Managers and teams were told upfront what the change would actually save them time on, and how it would work, before being asked to adopt anything. 
• Starting small. App-based clocking in and holiday booking came first: simple, low-risk wins that built trust before anything more complex followed. 
• Taking auto-scheduling slowly. Only once the basics were solid did the team move on to the harder, more valuable work of automating scheduling itself. 

James Blackbrough was candid about why the timing of all this mattered as much as the plan itself: 

"If we tried to do this before Covid, I think we would have had a very different result."

Teams had already grown comfortable using technology in daily life by the time the change arrived, making it a much easier ask than it would have been a few years earlier.

Sean Ghouse credits much of the project's success not to any single decision, but to the culture the team built around listening:

"The success has come from the floor, from operators. What we've got is a team that's willing to listen, to hear, to be curious, to understand from the people that live and breathe it at the coalface what this system needs to do."

What actually changed for everyone

The results, once they landed, touched almost everyone differently.

For the business, real-time visibility into payroll replaced the old routine of waiting until month-end to find out whether a store had overspent. As James Blackbrough put it, describing the shift:

"We're used to always having to wait until the month had finished to see any sort of payroll result, so it was always a bit nervous, have I overspent, don't know what I've spent. This will give us the ability to do a period review of spend and payroll, and that unlocks a lot for managers."

For managers, schedules are now visible weeks in advance, holiday requests can be booked from a phone, and clocking in no longer depends on a machine sitting on the shop floor.

For colleagues, the change was more personal, and this is the part Blackbrough lights up talking about:

"It just makes life easier for them, having their schedules ahead, they can just go on their phone and check what they're working, weeks ahead."

But it's Sean Ghouse's own reflection that captures why this mattered so much to a business built on people, not just process: 

"Our biggest asset is our teams that are facing our customers. Giving them the time to plan properly, to see loved ones, go to weddings, live their lives outside of work, really does help the overall culture."

 

What's next: growing the craft

Fortnum & Mason's transformation isn't finished, and by design, it may never quite be. The team is now exploring skills-based flexibility, looking at how specialists across tea, fragrance, and hospitality might flex and grow into other areas without losing the depth of craft the business is known for.

Sean Ghouse is optimistic about what that unlocks, both for the business and for the people who make it what it is:

"We've got so many experienced people and the craft of what we do in different departments. If I can see a gap that someone wants to go and cover another area, how can I invest in their skill sets if they want to grow themselves in retail?"

Reflecting on how far the process has already come, and what it took to get the details right, Ghouse offered the line that sums up the whole approach: 

"If you've never worked on the shop floor, you're never going to get it."

The takeaways

• You don't need to disrupt to modernise. Fortnum & Mason changed one of its oldest habits without touching what makes the brand distinctive, proof that tradition and technology aren't opposites. 
• Sequencing builds trust. Starting with clocking in and holiday booking, before touching auto-scheduling, gave teams small wins to believe in before asking for something bigger. 
• Timing matters as much as the plan. Doing this after Covid, when people were already comfortable with everyday tech, made the whole rollout land more easily than it might have a few years earlier. 
• Visibility changes behaviour, not just reporting. Real-time payroll data didn't just make month-end easier, it gave managers the confidence to make better decisions in the moment. 
• The best return isn't always the one you planned for. Skills-based flexibility wasn't the original goal, it emerged once the basics were solid, and it may end up being the most valuable part of the whole journey. 

Fortnum & Mason's story is a genuinely hopeful one for any business that assumes its heritage is a reason to stand still. Sometimes protecting what makes you special starts with fixing the things that were quietly making life harder for the people delivering it.