Hotel operators are getting closer to normalized levels of job openings, but they're still coping with elevated wages and drops in productivity, experts said.
During the "Boardroom Outlook: People" session at the 2024 Americas Lodging Investment Summit, Remington Hospitality CEO Sloan Dean said finding ways to avoid backsliding on productivity will be key to success this year. He said finding ways to automate where possible will help.
"A good example is we just rolled out software in [our legal department] that automates the contract review process and makes it more efficient, and our need to hire paralegals is lessened," he said. "It actually saved me from hiring one or two paralegals because our contract volumes are up since we grew [our portfolio] by 25%."
Dean said productivity will have to take something of a hit, with more housekeepers on staff and brands reinstituting requirements for daily housekeeping.
Aimbridge Hospitality President of Global Operations Mark Tamis said his company has reached a point where "about 90% of our positioned are filled."
"We're in a much better place than we were two years ago," he said.
Dean said wage growth has also stabilized, albeit at a higher point than it was. He said Remington is still working to scale back contract labor, which has historically hovered around 8% of the company's workforce but has doubled during periods of labor shortage.
Pat Pacious, president and CEO of Choice Hotels International, said a key part of his company's labor strategy has been opening up opportunities internally and giving growth paths. He said this has been particularly successful in developing talent for technology jobs.
"Over half of our new roles we created were filled internally, which is really giving people upward mobility in our business," he said.
Panelists agreed that diversifying their workforces — in particular leadership positions — is an ongoing challenge. National Association of Black Hotel Owners, Operators and Developers President and CEO Andy Ingraham said growing diversity in C-suite positions is what keeps him up at night. He added part of the problem is people from diverse backgrounds not being given the same opportunities to grow their careers.
He pointed to his home city of Miami as an example.
"Miami is a crazy market, but when we looked at the matrix hotels — the whole of South Florida is a big market — but yet there's just three black general managers," Ingraham said. "How is that possible?"
Choice's Pacious said his company instituted a "Rooney Rule" — a reference to the NFL's requirements to interview diverse candidates for all positions — roughly seven years ago to address that problem.
"We want you to interview a broad array of people, and that has helped us get more diversity in our ranks," he said. "We're not where we want to be, right? We are ahead of our goals on African Americans, Native Americans and Hispanic Americans, but we're behind on women. We've got great representation of women in the middle ranks, but it's about getting to that next level."
Tamis said Aimbridge sets annual goals in hopes of finding "continuous improvement."
"We set benchmarks for year-over-year improvement," he said. "We want to improve by at least 5% year over year in our diversity pool."
Remington's Dean said having those types of goals is a positive, but hotel companies must find ways to address "the root causes" that leave people of different backgrounds out of potential career advancement.
"You have to have grassroots solutions for some of the problems of why there's a diversity gap to begin with," he said. "In fact, we have a lot of Hispanic Spanish-speaking individuals in our housekeeping departments. Well, the reason they can't become a supervisor or a [general manager] in a lot of cases is they're not fluent in English or they haven't necessarily seen a financial statement. For them to be able to rise up, we started an [English as a second language] program targeted at our food and beverage and housekeeping department."
He said expanding benefits such as maternity and paternity leave can also open growth pathways.
"If you're a woman in the workplace, unfortunately if you have children, there's kind of that barrier," Dean said. "You have to have programs that support women in the workplace."