Incentives: Stella Weekes, from Mainline Employment, gives long-serving staff free holidays abroad

Mainline Employment, Stella Weeks
Winner of The Best In-house Staff Benefit Scheme

Working for Stella is the trip of a lifetime

STELLA Weekes does not believe in doing things by half when it comes to rewarding her staff for a job well done.

At the start of the New Year she will be taking all 32 of them and their partners on a company-paid holiday to Las Vegas.

But overseas trips are nothing new for those who work at Mainline Employment. They’ve already been treated by their boss to lunch in the Eiffel Tower, Christmas dinner in Vienna, a holiday in New York and whale watching in Iceland.

As if that was not enough to keep the staff on their toes there are quarterly competitions for excellent work which results in three prizes, the first being a weekend abroad.

Loyalty to the firm does not go unnoticed either. Those who have been with Mainline for 10 years are given a paid-for holiday with their partner.

The incentive schemes are not restricted to Mainline’s sales team, who are busy matching jobseekers with the right work.

“My payroll lady must be one of the most travelled payroll ladies in the industry, having been to New York, Lapland, Vienna, Paris and Iceland, just to name a few places,” says Stella .

But it’s not just the staff in her offices at North Street, Southville, who benefit from her largesse.

“There’s an incentive scheme for the temps who work hard for us. For every 10 hours they work they are given a raffle ticket to enter our Christmas draw which has more than 200 prizes,” said Stella , whose firm won the Best In-house Benefits category in the Evening Post Recruitment Awards.

“Running the business is not all about making money. These incentives are a great way of team building and thanking staff for all their hard work, and the holidays also give people memories.”

Apart from the more headline-catching schemes, Mainline pays its staff a basic salary in conjunction with a quarterly profitability scheme in which they get one per cent of the company’s profit. “I believe this makes them treat the business as their own,” says Stella.

The trip to Las Vegas will cost nearly £100,000 but is worth it, says Stella . “This is quite an undertaking for me. However, I believe I would be nowhere without my team and it is important to reward hard work.”

She will split her workforce in half for the holiday. One half will be in Las Vegas while the other half will keep the business running.

“I believe in taking people away when they may not have got the opportunity to spoil themselves. In this way we can have a much more rewarding effect on the team and, of course, it also motivates people more.”

Mainline is a 24-hour agency and Stella says all the team, including her, take turns to operate the out-of- office-hours phone. Staff are paid for this in the form of vouchers which they save for shopping and furniture.

Stella is the first to admit she is “fiercely competitive”. This is a trait that cost her her last job. Although she enjoyed working for a recruitment agency in Wiltshire, which covered Swindon, Reading and Newbury, she left after being told she could not enter any more of the firm’s incentive competitions because she was continually winning all the prizes.

She believes the way she runs the business has been instrumental in the firm having a low turnover of staff. Many of the workers have been with Mainline since it started 17 years ago, while others have been there between five and 12 years.

“To have such loyalty is very unusual in an industry which tends to be highly stressful and competitive,” she says.

It is also her firm belief that a good mix of ages and experience is important to the running of the business. She delights in telling me that her secretary is over 70 years old while the youngest member of staff is a salesgirl who is only 20.

“I like to take on people with no previous experience of the business, which is unusual in this line, and train them myself. We tend to keep the firms that use our service with us as we grow. We’ve also got more than 600 temps on the books, many of whom keep coming back.”

When each new employee starts Stella spends the first three days with them, training them and explaining how Mainline works and how they can benefit from its rather unusual incentive awards.