At the outset of the lockdowns in March 2020, PM Hotel Group President Joseph Bojanowski said he and his team knew the pandemic wasn’t going to be over in a week or two, but they thought they would be past the worst of it in a matter of months.
Speaking with Hotel News Now as part of our ongoing "Pandemic Reflections" series, Bojanowski said his team turned to their playbook of lessons learned from the Great Recession, knowing they had to take decisive action to navigate the following 90 days and then have operations start returning to normal. That led an assessment of what the pandemic would mean to the world, specifically the U.S. hotel industry and then for PM Hotel Group itself.
The company then moved to mitigation, looking at the steps it could take that were appropriate at the time to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on the company and its employees, he said. The third would be pivoting to recovery as quickly as possible, identifying business opportunities.
“Unfortunately, what that resulted in was what we thought was a temporary layoff of roughly two-thirds of our workforce,” he said. “We never envisioned that we would have 20-year employees and team members who we would not see again for years.”
Adrenaline kept the company going through the first year of the pandemic, and by the start of the second year, it was clear that it wasn’t going away anytime soon, Bojanowski said. That took its toll on the company, particularly the employees who had been laid off. Everyone was tired, and the recovery was increasingly looking like a U-shape rather than the V-shape previously predicted.
"When that started to settle in, it was difficult, and it was difficult as a leader of an organization that had two-thirds of what were very loyal team members who we had spent tremendous amount of time and years training, and in a lot of levels becoming friends with, that they weren't coming back anytime soon,” he said. “From there, it kind of moved into a time for reflection.”
PM Hotel Group was an “extremely” associate- and team member-focused organization before the pandemic, he said.
“But I don’t know that our empathy — mine personally and then as an organization — that our empathy was at a level that it is today and coming out of the pandemic and the deeper consideration of our associates and their needs and how to really balance those with the needs of an organization or a hotel or guests,” he said.
Listen below for our full conversation with PM Hotel’s Joseph Bojanowski.