How Welcome Break created an EVP to support and retain their diverse and largely offline workforce, reducing turnover by 10%

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What they needed:

A Reward Gateway client since 2011, Welcome Break have long offered their employees a great selection of discounts. More recently as their operations expanded, the need to evolve the connection between the organisation and its largely offline employees grew – particularly around the ease of access to their benefits. 

Welcome Break faced a unique challenge in that they operate brands under franchise licence, working with 15 brand partners. This means that while the team are employed by Welcome Break, they work for brands such as Starbucks, KFC and Waitrose. Communicating with and engaging team members across these different services, and in different uniforms, therefore required a bespoke approach. 

The People team also had to consider the diverse makeup of their workforce, comprising multiple generations, 75 nationalities and 25 ethnicities. Not only did they feel it was important to provide a wide range of benefits to cater for the different age groups and lifestyles, but they also recognised that they needed to be strategic with how they communicated with their wider team.

How we helped:

Working with Reward Gateway, the team launched My Welcome Break. This fully-branded platform offers their employees a centralised location to receive company communications and access their benefits. The People team initially launched the platform with Discounts and later introduced the Cycle to Work benefit. They’ve continued using Employee Surveys to keep their finger on the pulse of their employees’ wants and needs. These surveys guided Welcome Break to evolve their benefits package further with the introduction of Reward and Recognition programmes and the Wellbeing Centre. 

Staying connected with their diverse and multigenerational workforce has been one of the team’s key goals for their employee engagement platform. My Welcome Break allows them to communicate easily with their dispersed workforce, who can access the platform via computer or mobile device, whilst building peer-to-peer connection through Reward and Recognition – whether it’s a Thank You eCard or an Instant Award.

What they achieved:

As a one-stop-shop engagement platform that has evolved over time to respond to the needs of the employees, My Welcome Break has helped the People team to reduce company’s labour turnover consistently over the last few years. In addition, their annual engagement survey has shown that the number of employees who recommended Welcome Break as a place to work has increased year-over-year since 2021. 

Support for employees’ financial, mental and physical wellbeing has been shown through the success of benefits like Discounts, which has saved the team £50,000 each year on average and Cycle to Work, which has saved employees £13,700 and the company £5,900 in National Insurance contributions over 3 years. Welcome Break’s dedication to delivering an exceptional employee value proposition has also led to the introduction of Total Reward Statements, a tool that enables employees to see the true value of working for Welcome Break, with personalised insights into how much monetary and non-monetary value they receive from discounts, cashback, rewards and other benefits.

The team now regularly use Reward Manager, their administration portal, to report on their efforts, establish the ROI of the platform and inform their campaign planning. These reports allow them to see which areas of the platform are being used the most, where employees are spending money and identify areas and benefits that they can drive more awareness to.