Head of Rewards

Head of Reward

Location: Dunstable (3 days working in the office, 2 days from home or alternative location)

Package: £130,000 - £140,000 dependant on skills and experiences + car allowance + up to 50% bonus + health + bens

Function: People Team

Reporting to: Reward, Pensions & Insight Director

Lead Reward Strategy at Scale. Shape the Future of Hospitality.

At Whitbread, we’re proud to be one of the UK’s leading hospitality businesses, with a heritage that goes back nearly 300 years! Whitbread is home to Premier Inn, Bar+Block, Beefeater and more. With a significant multi-million pound investment in reward every year, we’re looking for a strategic and commercially astute Head of Reward to lead our UK-wide reward, pay, incentive, benefits and recognition strategy.

This is a rare opportunity to influence how we attract, retain and engage our 35,000+ team, from our team members and managers in our hotels and restaurants to our support centres in Dunstable and London.

What You’ll Be Responsible For

• Designing and delivering a future-focused reward architecture across pay, incentives, benefits and recognition.
• Managing the annual pay and incentive cycles for both hourly-paid and salaried populations.
• Partnering with ExCo, Operations Leadership, HR and Finance to align Reward with business strategy.
• Driving a recognition culture that celebrates performance, loyalty, and service.
• Ensuring compliance, governance, and financial control across all reward activities.
• Leading a high-performing team of Reward professionals.

What Makes This Role Unique

• Scale & Breadth: Influence the full spectrum of reward strategy across a large multi-sited, hourly-paid workforce and corporate teams.
• Strategic Impact: Shape frameworks that support attraction, retention and progression.
• Visibility & Influence: Work closely with senior leaders and your external Reward networks.
• Innovation & Challenge: Navigate a complex labour market and evolving reward landscape.

What We’re Looking For

• Proven experience managing reward for a multi-site, hourly-paid workforce.
• Deep expertise in pay, incentives, benefits and recognition strategy.
• Strong leadership and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence at the highest levels and ability to continue developing team (3 x direct reports, wider team of 6)
• Commercially savvy, data-driven and passionate about creating equitable and engaging reward solutions.
• A natural networker who thrives on external benchmarking and thought leadership.

Ready to Make an Impact?

Join Whitbread and help shape a reward strategy that supports our people, drives performance, and reflects our values. If you're a strategic thinker with a passion for people and performance—we want to hear from you.

We are proud to have been recognised as a Top Employer for 14 consecutive years, voted a top apprenticeship employer by Department of Education and Rate my Apprenticeship, this year we placed #10 in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index for our commitment to LGBTQIA+ inclusion at Whitbread and have been awarded as a Top 25 Exemplary Employer in the Investing in Ethnicity Parliamentary Matrix as the only hospitality company leading the way in terms of Inclusion.