In one of the many famous scenes of the movie "A Few Good Men," Jack Nicholson’s character asks Tom Cruise’s character, “You ever put your life in another man’s hands and, in return, asked him to put his life in yours?”
This directly applies to the hospitality talent game today. Let me explain.
While our jobs aren’t life or death, as with the U.S. Marines, Aaron Sorkin does make a good point that we need to be willing to stick our necks out for our employees because they’re where our biggest successes lie.
We hear a lot of buzz about how to solve the labor shortage. While it’s vital we take a look in the mirror and make tough decisions about how to approach the marketplace with more flexibility, empathy and humility, we also need to be leaning into our local marketplace to truly understand the needs of our employees.
The needs of your urban hotel employees will be drastically different than those of your airport hotel employees. Do they require public transportation benefits? Carpooling benefits? We must meet our talent where they are to win the marketplace.
There will always be a natural tension between people and profit, but I challenge everyone, including myself, to put people first. The onus is on us as hotel executives to cultivate and foster positive work environments that set employees up to thrive. This includes genuinely investing in your talent. Once we lose sight of that, we lose what makes our organizations special.
Investing in Employees’ Life Cycles
We as leaders must take ownership of our employees’ life cycles with intentionality. Identifying and leaning into personal and professional growth is a great way to invest in our employees. If there is a porter, for example, who shows impeccable leadership and guest service skills, we should pave a path for that person to harness these gifts.
Promoting staff from within sets a precedent for other employees that there is room to thrive within the company. The hospitality industry is a great equalizer, where individuals can begin their careers at any level within the organization and rise to general manager, area manager, vice president and beyond.
By offering training programs such as English as a second language, emotional intelligence seminars and leadership classes, we’re not only investing in the future of our companies but helping to put our money where our mouths are when it comes to being great places to work.
Benefits Programs To Boost Buy-In
As your company grows, creating buy-in from employees can feel more complicated. Competitive compensation and total rewards packages are a no-brainer these days. Companies must authentically and consistently invest in a benefits platform to boost buy-in and identify ways to show employees thought and effort.
Something as seemingly minor as creating dedicated hydration stations throughout hotels with messaging around the importance of drinking water regularly can make a big difference for associates. Providing them with water bottles would be easy enough, but these stations demonstrate our commitment to improving the health and wellness of associates.
Wellness programs seem trite, but they can boost companywide camaraderie and affect company success and employee satisfaction. Quarterly activity challenges with impressive prizes at the end aren’t just a great way to encourage employees to lead healthier lives. These programs also provide greater access to other company segments, such as the C-suite and others in leadership positions. It’s also an important reminder that we’re in the business of creating fun for guests. Why shouldn’t we extend that energy to associates?
Best Practices for Transition
Poising yourself to win the hospitality talent game is no easy feat, but the first step is to honestly assess where your organization is with employee buy-in. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- What does my company’s turnover look like?
- How many people did we internally promote in the last year?
- Do we have a high engagement rate with our internal programs?
If you didn’t like the answers to these questions, it’s time to invest better in your team. Start small. It’s essential to spend time communicating with your teams and understand what they value, not what the business section of the Sunday paper tells you they value.
A great way to do this is with benchmarking surveys, which will help you understand what will give them the most value so they, in turn, care about what they’re offered.
Mastering the hospitality talent game is aspirational, and it’s not an easy endeavor, but it’s what separates the good from the great employers. A company’s leadership team must be 100% committed to their employees to become the employer of choice, and every decision should have their employees and associates at the forefront.
Chris Green is president of Remington Hotels.
The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.