Motorway service area operator Welcome Break aligns its core values to its recognition scheme to ensure its workforce feel valued.
It employs 6,300 people across 61 service areas on motorways and the strategic road network, as well as 31 hotels, in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Welcome Break’s senior managers and senior leaders have an amount of recognition credit available each month that they can use to reward employees when they do a great job, based on the core values of ‘we care, we are a team and we deliver’. It provides recognition little and often, rather than large recognition amounts, so everyday moments are captured, recognised and rewarded.
These could be helping a customer change a tyre, or engaging with children so that their parents can have a moment to have a sip of hot coffee or a bite to eat, says Nicola Marshall, people director at Welcome Break.
“It could also be supporting a colleague, doing good for charity or delivering excellence during an audit,” she adds. ”Our goal is to make sure employees feel valued, even when doing their day-to-day [roles]. For some, this just comes naturally and is part of being in hospitality. It’s about catching the small moments that often go unnoticed or overlooked.”
For the employer, retention is key, and it aims to ensure employees want to stay in their roles for as long as possible, whether they are studying while working or building a long-term career. It feels that trained and recognised staff who feel a sense of purpose and connection will stay longer and are more productive, reducing its need to recruit.
Based on staff feedback that they wanted to feel their contribution mattered, Welcome Break changed how it rewards and recognises employees in 2019, moving away from ad-hoc thank-you gifts such as chocolates, wine or free meals. These were not linked to its employer values or purpose. The organisation launched it’s team member of the month recognition scheme and value-based recognition scheme, which is linked to organisational values, in March 2019.
These recognise 93 winners per month, explains Marshall.
“There are 61 service area winners, 31 hotel winners and one head office winner, where they achieve £50 credited to their reward account, as well as peer-to-peer recognition,” she says. ”We aligned this to a values relaunch to ensure everyone was aligned to these, as well as our purpose, to deliver an exceptional customer experience for people on the move.”
Welcome Break measures the effectiveness of its recognition scheme by looking at data, such as how much has been awarded and how long an employee stays with the organisation.
“Feeling valued is mentioned time and time again in our employee experience survey that we run annually in October. In 2025, we had record participation and our highest ever engagement scores,” Marshall says.
