Your Say

Leadership

Skills development

Job opportunities

WINcard and link remuneration strategy

Team members - opportunities to share in Whitbread's success

'Good Together' people pledges

Introduction

We believe that if we create a great place to work for our people, they will provide our customers with special experiences so that they come back time and time again.

We measure our success in creating a great place to work through the Your Say survey, with the key metrics being the response rate and the engagement score.

Your Say

Your Say, our employee opinion survey, is conducted twice a year and provides us with great insight into what matters most to our teams. Action plans are developed after each survey to focus on improving our team members’ ability to provide a great experience for our customers.

The Your Say results for 2011/12 are based on feedback from 31,000 employees and demonstrate good progress as shown below:

Work has recently begun to refresh the survey to help deliver greater insights and understanding of our teams. This in turn will lead to stronger and more effective action planning which we believe will enable engagement levels to improve further.

Leadership

A critical focus area for the year ahead is to build our talent and succession pipeline to meet our ambitious growth strategy. We continue to invest in building leadership capability and have developed a leadership framework which describes the leadership behaviours we believe will make us successful. Our two-day leadership development programme allows space and time for our leaders to understand how they can engage with their teams to create an environment for success. To date more than 320 leaders have experienced this programme and benefited from the intensive focus on their personal development. The programme is run and facilitated by our own leadership team and continues to receive excellent feedback.

Skills development

An important component of improving team engagement is providing Whitbread people with the ability to progress through the organisation. We operate a number of programmes aimed at giving team members the tools to help them develop as individuals.

In March, a new Advanced Apprenticeship in Hospitality Supervision and Leadership, integrated into our management development programmes, was launched with a commitment to pilot a Higher Apprenticeship, which is new to the hospitality sector and equivalent to a Foundation Degree.

The four key elements of our skills development programme continue to be:

• English and mathematics;

• Whitbread Apprenticeships;

• specialist technical skills training; and

• management skills and development.

This growing range of opportunities is critical to attracting and developing great people, who value the chance to progress.

In our Costa stores we serve an unbeatable cup of handmade coffee. All Baristas begin their coffee-making education in store with us as soon as they join. We continue to nurture their skill and development through our Barista Maestro programme. With a commitment to on-the-job learning and career progression, our Baristas and assistant managers need expert coaching and leadership from our store managers. To achieve this we have stepped up our management training through Costa’s leadership development programme.

Job opportunities

Our growth strategy makes Whitbread an exciting place to work with numerous opportunities available for talented people to progress. We are proud of our ability to develop people throughout our business and to build exciting and diverse careers for them.

As well as the opportunities presented by UK growth, our international expansion through Costa and Premier Inn offers exciting opportunities for some of our talented team members to experience working overseas in our international business.

We focus our energy on developing the skills that equip our teams to confidently deliver an unbeatable customer experience. We recognise this is pivotal to our commitment to maintaining our highly engaged teams, who in turn serve our customers with pride for the product and pride for their place of work.

UK opportunities

Whitbread created 2,500 new jobs during the year, with half of these roles being filled by the young or long-term unemployed. We are focused on providing long-term career opportunities for all of our people by creating a great place to work. In total there were 10,000 roles filled in the hotels and restaurants businesses and from our management appointments 82% were filled internally.

Within our Costa business we also believe in developing our talent internally and this year we have celebrated the graduation of over 2,500 of our team members from our talent development programmes – Barista Maestro and Stars.

International opportunities

Our talent management and global mobility strategies are developing the international leadership capability to support our expansion plans.

We are working with our business partners to ensure that there are innovative ways of involving people that:

• enable the delivery of the brand promise;

• support the creation of a high team engagement culture; and

• drive high performance.

Our aim is to develop a global people framework that will enable our leaders to meet future organisational challenges and opportunities and to deliver sustainable performance.

WINcard and link to remuneration strategy

Team engagement is key to the Company’s ability to achieve its strategic aims. For this reason, leaders throughout the organisation, including the executive directors, are incentivised to achieve excellent levels of engagement within their teams.

In addition, we measure how well we take care of our people and our customers via our health and safety audits. You will see we have achieved a green health and safety audit score for 2011/12, which is a fundamental hurdle to achieve bonus payouts across other WINcard measures.

The Your Say measure was amber for the Group.  The team engagement score was 73% which didn’t quite meet the stretching target set despite being an improvement on the prior year. Team turnover was also amber at the Group level in 2011/12, driven by a green score for Costa and a red score for Hotels & Restaurants. The Hotels & Restaurants team turnover target was very challenging for 2011/12, although the trend has improved over a longer period, with a 6%pts improvement since 2009. Our team turnover remains consistently better than it is for our competitors.

Team members – opportunities to share in Whitbread’s success

Our teams are integral to Whitbread’s ability to deliver its strategy. Providing opportunities for them to earn additional rewards for contributing to great results and to share in Whitbread’s success is very important.

New incentive schemes  In 2011 we launched ‘Feel Good’ in Costa and ‘Guest Promise’ in WHR which provides an incentive for all team members to really care for our customers and be inspired to deliver great service. All our front line teams now have an opportunity to earn additional rewards above their base pay and we have made over 15,000 team member awards since the launch of the two schemes in the second half of 2011.

Sharesave We actively encourage our teams to connect to the success of the organisation through our Sharesave scheme, which is available to all employees and offers an option price discounted by 20%. The three and five year schemes which matured in February 2012 delivered a return of approximately £4.3 million, shared between more than 1,100 employees. This is an excellent way for our teams to share in the success of the Company.

Pay for progression  Giving team members the opportunity to develop and progress is very important, but it is equally important that we reward them appropriately as they do progress. Offering a clear route of pay progression to all team members will drive team engagement and help to create a great place to work and learn.

All team members currently have the opportunity to progress their pay through development into more skilled roles or into management through ‘Shooting Stars’. Our growth depends on attracting bright people with potential and retaining our skilled team members. Our aim is to map out a clear route to pay progression for all roles, motivating and inspiring all to achieve their potential.

Recognition and celebration  Recognition and the celebration of success help to create an environment in which people see that their work is valued and important and are inspired to achieve.

Whether it is our ‘Team Member of the Quarter’ award, our ‘General Manager of the Year’ award or one of the many customer compliments recognising the day-to-day service excellence of our teams, we want it to be meaningful recognition which is celebrated and shared.

‘Good Together’ people pledges

We have developed a new set of people pledges that feed into our ‘Good Together’ corporate responsibility programme. Our people pledges are focused on improving the lives of the people who work for us and the lives within the communities in which we operate. Our aim is to positively impact the following social issues:

• reducing the skills gap;

• reducing youth unemployment;

• championing healthier lifestyles; and

• supporting charities and good causes.