The show on the road
Welcome Break's HR Director Karl Jolly on how the organisation created a bigger-brand, bigger-business culture‘Toilets,’ declares Karl Jolly, ‘are a big part of our business.’
The HR Director of Welcome Break isn’t joking. He estimates that over 90% of visitors to his sites are only really there to use the loo. But even so, the numbers of visitors are impressive: ‘We’d get 80 million a year through our doors no matter what we did, or how badly we did it,’ Jolly adds.
With footfall as impressive as this, an organisation can’t help but wonder how more visitor transactions can be encouraged. If 80 million people all spent a tenner, rather than just spending a penny – well, that’d be some going.
About five years ago, Welcome Break embarked on a new strategy. Out went the tired old own brands. (Remember Julie’s Pantry, Red Hen, The Granary or Coffee Primo? No, us neither.) In their place they franchised into some of the biggest retail and hospitality names on the planet – Starbucks, KFC, Burger King – even Waitrose, which had never franchised to anyone before.
Suddenly, the sites were complex franchisors packed with all kinds of variables in terms of skills and delivery protocols. Jolly and his team were faced by the need to deliver massive, intricate change.
In particular, Jolly thought hard about the culture and how it should be developed. ‘It needed to be re-engineered, re-designed, re-wired,’ he said. He recognises the importance of proactive management of culture. ‘If you don’t design a culture, you get one anyway,’ he says warily.
The change deliverables had four themes. There needed to be a clear vision and values; ‘tools and artefacts’; and an articulated leadership style, all of which ‘set expectations for managers to say and do the right things.’ Finally, a new set of systems underpinned it all, ‘which helped to release discretionary energy.’
Welcome Break engaged a communications agency to create a striking, colourful suite of attraction materials. Leadership style cohered around three major thoughts: alignment, recognition and communication.
But perhaps it’s Welcome Break’s approach to recognition that’s the most striking of the innovations. The organisation doesn’t skimp here, offering the kind of bonuses one wouldn’t expect to find this side of Goldman Sachs.
‘We can give away five or six Rolexes a year,’ says Jolly. ‘Plus minis, sports cars and courses at places like Harvard and Disney.’ An internal award ceremony, ‘The Breakies,’ was another ‘superbly well executed’ initiative introduced by Jolly’s team.
Technology naturally played a part. Welcome Break made a substantial investment in the HR suite Success Factors, and squeezed the asset hard. Success Factors’ ‘Jam’ collaboration software has been particularly well leveraged, with 98.6% of staff signing up to use it it. A Jam-based recognition app called Kudos – on which colleagues share recognition for good deeds and exceptional performance – has been used over 8000 times.
All this has helped Welcome Break stay together culturally during a period of ostensible division. (Employees wear different separate uniforms, for example, depending on which franchise they’re working in.) In fact, engagement seems to have hit a high this summer when, in the organisation’s peak trading season, with an initiative called ‘Go the extra smile’. This initiative, says Jolly, aligned the business still further and delivered a whole new tranche of enthusiastically adopted reward tools.
Jolly also restructured his central HR team. Out went the HR Business Partners, in came half-a-dozen ‘shared specialisms’. An HR management system that the team branded ‘Drive’ was also introduced, helping with the urgent task of centralising data. ‘Since the changes, we no longer had 28 sites, but 250 teams,’ remarks Jolly.
What’s next? More brands are joining the Welcome Break fold, including the trendy salad outlet Tossed, stalwart chippy Harry Ramsden’s and ice cream kings Baskin Robbins.
Meanwhile, according to the Employee Opinion Survey, the percentage of employees likely to recommend working at Welcome Break continues to improve. (The Net Promoter Score has risen dramatically from -23% to +21%.)
There’s also an operational restructure that will take the organisation from two large regions to four smaller ones.
‘That’s to allow more focus on customer service and operational excellence,’ says Jolly. ‘It’ll help us to focus on performance coaching and follow up, given the much smaller span of control. It’s quite a big investment overhead-wise, but we believe it’s crucial to our moving on as a business.’
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