Each year, Welcome Break has 80 million customers coming through its hotel and services doors, throughout the UK. Director of People, Karl Jolly, explains how the business has grown and developed, and how the operation has been transformed to meet the challenges.
Welcome Break Group has gone through a remarkable transformation over the past three years, moving from what was essentially a roadside catering company to a multi-faceted retail business.
As the UK’s second largest operator of motorway services and hotels, Welcome Break has been operating since 1960. The company has grown from a single service area at Newport Pagnell on the M1 motorway to 28 large sites across the UK, employing more than 4,500 people: “About three years ago, we made the conscious decision to move into world class high street brands” said Welcome Break’s Director of People, Karl Jolly, “we changed from serving our own coffee to Starbucks, introduced Waitrose and WH Smith retail outlets into our sites, and extended our food service business to include major brands such as Burger King and KFC to operate alongside our own self-service restaurant, Eat In. Our objective was to move from simply providing roadside catering to delivering a high street retail experience that is better or as good as the high street brands deliver themselves.”
The company shifted from a decentralised business that relied on the individual initiative and business acumen of its site directors, to a more structured, centralised discipline. As part of that shift, Welcome Break needed to ensure that its 4,500 employees are all aligned with corporate goals at every level of the organisation. This required a major transformational shift in its workforce and presented a significant challenge for Jolly and his team. The company’s previous HR processes were all manually managed in paper form and spreadsheets on a site by site basis and emailed into the company’s headquarters. Likewise, Welcome Break’s payroll system was the only means it had of holding employee records centrally, while training and learning requirements were recorded manually. With dispersed and site-specific processes, it was difficult to identify internal talent or cross-train staff to work with the different high street brands represented by the Group.
It was important that Welcome Break delivered uniform and consistent delivery of the high street brands across its numerous sites. It couldn’t afford, for example, for the Starbucks customer experience in one of its motorway services sites to be any less than the same Starbucks experience on the high street or anywhere else: “Everything on site is ours,” said Jolly. “The whole team of 200-300 people in a single site all work for us, but just happen to be representing additional brands, such as Waitrose or KFC, under our umbrella. So we had the dual challenge of training staff at a base level to work with the different brands, using their respective materials and systems, but still representing the Welcome Break culture and service values, not just those of the branded counter they stand behind. We had to ask ourselves what organisational culture we wanted the Welcome Break brand to reflect,” he added. “We wanted all our employees to have the same sense of vision and purpose. At a fundamental level, our core business is to literally deliver a welcome break for our customers from a hospitality perspective. That means providing decent coffee, a quality range of food and retail options, and quality facilities supported by a welcoming friendly service.”
To achieve this, the company knew it needed to address its existing HR systems and processes if it was to transform and align its entire workforce around a single culture and set of competencies. “Our new chief executive also wanted to revisit the HR function,” added Jolly. “Previously, there had been a separate HR and training function, so the first thing I did was to bring HR and training together to be the ‘people team’. I also wanted to provide employees with suitable training and career progression opportunities in order to enable them to transfer across different brands and business units as required. This means that everyone who works for our organisation can taste life in the various franchises and are offered plenty of scope to experience different environments. It was HR’s job to spearhead the strategic new business initiative that will enable us to gain full visibility of our internal talent, insight into individual training and competency requirements, as well as the ability to cross-train and promote staff across different brands and business units.”
Welcome Break is currently in the process of deploying SuccessFactors cloud-based applications to all team members, Employee Central, SAP Jam, Recruiting, Performance & Goals, Learning, and Succession & Development. The SuccessFactors solutions are helping Welcome Break to develop internal talent, drive employee performance and transform the company’s workforce. Welcome Break will be able to ensure corporate goal alignment across both divisions and individual employees, empower better collaboration, create a more versatile and mobile talent pool through employee training, development and career progression, support the company’s online recruiting initiatives and help deliver annual six figure savings for the organisation.
The software suite is helping Welcome Break to develop internal talent, drive employee performance and transform the company’s workforce. Welcome Break will be able to ensure corporate goal alignment across both divisions and individual employees, create a more versatile and mobile talent pool, support employee training, development and career progression, and help deliver annual six figure savings for the organisation. “It helps us to really revolutionise what we do,” said Jolly. “It provides us with a strong foundation for where we want our business to go in the future. Optimised performance from aligned, engaged and capable people is really important to us if we are to maintain our market-leading position. The system has been well received and we’ve seen some unexpected collaboration and communication between managers across different sites. Like all businesses, our older employees will eventually move out of the workforce, so we also needed to ensure we are empowering our younger generation of workers with clear succession plans and enable them to engage with the company’s HR processes using social media tools and mobile devices.”
It was this type of challenge that attracted Jolly to the role in the first place. He has spent his whole career in the hospitality and food and drink industries, starting as a teenage dishwasher at TGI Fridays and steadily progressed his HR career with the likes of Pret-A-Manger, All Bar One, and Bass, now part of Mitchells and Butler. It was at Mitchells and Butler where he mastered the difficult challenge of taking big organisational strategy and implementing it into brands before joining the Welcome Break Group as HR Director in 2011.
“Mitchells and Butlers were leaders in setting the standard around service, so I’ve been lucky to have had the benefit of bringing that experience to this role,” he said. “We spend a lot of time on who we should recruit, how we should train them, and then focus on the development of managers and senior managers at site level, and invest in their development.” One of the ways that he attempts to do the latter is to select four or five high-performing managers each year and, as a thank you, send them on a course at Harvard University or Walt Disney as a way of saying ‘thank you and we’d like to invest in you’.
“I had the benefit of attending the Harvard courses myself, and have now implemented them at Welcome Break. Likewise, Disney’s courses, for example, are a great fit for our management team as they have a very similar business to us in terms of high volumes of customers and delivery of multi-faceted services. It’s a good nice way of investing in someone personally. Our managers are responsible for driving multiple services under the Welcome Break umbrella, from coffee and gaming to retail, forecourt and catering. We have a responsibility as an employer to ensure we equip our staff with a range of distinct skills and an inspired sense of purpose. We get 80 million customers a year regardless of what we do. That means we can have a good business or we can have a fantastic business if we take care of them. About 98 percent of them use our toilets!
Our challenge is how we can give them the products and service they want and expect.” In addition to the goal alignment, talent transparency and investment in training and development, Jolly and his team also understand they are on a change management journey to understand the difference between managing 28 big sites to managing 220 individual units of brand delivery. “It’s about putting focus and development on the site mangers, unit business managers and making them high street capable, as well as Welcome Break capable,” he added. “Ultimately, I have a goal of re-engineering our business with even greater capabilities at the management team level.” Welcome Break is about half way through its two year transformation. The company began by deploying SAP Jam, Employee Central and Recruiting Management first, with the additional solutions to follow in the coming months. The company expects to be fully deployed over the next year. “All of our recruitment is now done online prior to interview to improve our administration processes. Training and elearning are also more visible in terms of competencies and skills across our workforce.”
Once the transformation is completed, the Group is estimates it can reduce employee turnover by ten percent due to improved quality of hires, faster on boarding, efficient training, clear measurable objectives and career and succession planning. This alone could deliver a six figure saving. Welcome Break is also expecting to gain a five figure cost savings on its external recruitment costs as 25 percent of the vacancies will be internally filled, thanks to the visibility of its talent pool and its succession planning. The company is also estimating a significant boost in employee productivity and engagement, which could also deliver six figures back to the organisation. “We are now able to cascade our goals and objectives and rigorously measure them throughout the organisation, sharing best practice across employees, improved training and training records, greater workforce stability, and more effective use of management time. It really is quite a transformation for us.”
