Geoff Ballotti was the last person to leave Wyndham Hotels & Resorts headquarters in Parsippany, New Jersey, on Friday, March 13, 2020.
The CEO and president of the company had been in all-day meetings with Wyndham leadership trying to determine everything from how long the offices would remain closed to what to tell franchisees around the world, and his next stop that evening would be Boston to see his family, including his mother, wife and three of his daughters who were nurses in the city.
“I turned my phone back on as soon as I drove out of the parking lot here … and it was just lit up with text messages and it began to ring,” he said. Wyndham franchisees from around the world were on the line.
Without any visibility into the future, Ballotti and his team had hours earlier let all global franchisees know that they would not be required to pay any receivables to Wyndham indefinitely, and the company would not assess interest or be “looking for anything in return.”
Ballotti told Hotel News Now as part of its ongoing Pandemic Reflections series that taking a people-centric approach from the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has returned positive results on the company tenfold in the years since.
Showing grace to franchisees and employees is a value that Ballotti said has only become stronger throughout the company since the pandemic, and that's measured in trust.
“The best measurement is always franchisee engagement, and the best data point is our annual retention rate, and we watched our annual retention rate continue to improve throughout COVID,” he said.
Maintaining employee trust was a huge priority for Ballotti, too, and he accomplished that by establishing clear return-to-office guidelines early on while being cognizant that people’s lives may have drastically changed during the years and the company needed to be able to meet them where they were.
“We announced very early on that we will be hybrid [at headquarters], we will be in the office Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and headquarters would be closed Monday and Friday,” he said. “That would not change. We would not be changing our minds … three months from now, six months from now, a year from now. And we finished 2022 with a higher team member retention rate than we had back in 2019.”
Ballotti said the stronger trust between managers and team members is tangible and evident, and that acknowledging hard work goes such a long way.
“We knew our team had more on their plate, but it was absolutely positively OK if you had moved, and were in Florida or were in California or living in Vail, and had a job you could continue to do remotely, that was OK,” he said. “There’s a lot more trust. I do think we have a happier and more productive workforce and team … and I know we have a much more engaged group of small business owner” franchisees.
For our full conversation with Wyndham Hotels & Resorts' Geoff Ballotti, listen to the audio below.