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How to keep loyal employees challenged? Share them

Grace Hotels took a counterintuitive approach to building employee loyalty: It let them go.

The privately owned company, through a pilot strategic labor agreement last year, connected 11 seasonal employees of Grace Mykonos and Grace Santorini – a tenth of its total workforce there – with other luxury brands, mostly at Soneva hotels, whose seasons take up Greece’s downtime months from November to March.

The move, says Grace’s group HR director, Tim Williams, was prompted by requests from the employees themselves. The placements (10 guest-facing and one front-office) were in the Maldives, Thailand and Megève, France, and because the employees are seasonal, the agreements were treated as a second employment and not a secondment, said Tim Williams, Grace’s group HR director. This year, it’s expanding the program. HOTELS spoke with Williams about how the program worked and what they learned.

Grace Group HR Director Tim Williams: "I think a project like this is a way to ensure that talented people stay in our industry and stay in our group."
Grace Group HR Director Tim Williams: “I think a project like this is a way to ensure that talented people stay in our industry and stay in our group.”


HOTELS: What prompted the move to do this?

TIM WILLIAMS: Given the size of (Grace Hotels) today, we couldn’t, unfortunately, create opportunities within our own group because our other hotels are in the United States, where you obviously have certain visa issues, and Argentina, where, again, there are visa issues and also the need for Spanish. And so it became apparent that if we were going to be able to help our people (find year-round employment), we would have to look at external groups and create something new.

We started thinking about finding partners who perhaps shared our beliefs about human assets, where we could see alignment of core values, where we could see alignment around a genuine commitment to a positive culture and on business success that was built on the back of trust between managers and colleagues. And at the same time, in terms of the practice that we would look to partner with, we were looking for hotels of similar caliber.

H: How did you find the partner hotels?

TW: We started approaching groups where we had some sort of relationship, with an HR peer, or an operational leader within those groups, who would kind of get the concept, and who would get that if we pitched this correctly, it would be a win-win-win.

H: The hotels take a bit of a risk, given that the employees are free agents. Did everyone return to Grace?

TW: It was absolutely front of mind when we were talking about this. We always recognized that the upside for us was the chance to give a Greek colleague a career opportunity to make money during the off-season, to develop their skills and to build international experience, and that all of that would increase loyalty to Grace Hotels. But as we know, salaries and benefits in the Middle East and Indian Ocean can be higher than in their home market of Greece. And we did see a risk that some of the staff would choose to stay on and become permanent employees of the new group. However, in our view, that was a risk that was at least worth taking.

The only conversation that I had with my HR colleagues and those other groups was that if we ended up losing good people who would otherwise return to us, then it would be an unsustainable situation, and that we didn’t want to be a recruiting house for them to cherry pick our … well, any of our people. And so, they got that, and they committed that they would resist any internal temptation, that maybe their own department heads might have to offer permanent contracts. Now, of course, that couldn’t be a written commitment, that couldn’t be contractual because … they are free agents at this point. And as it happened, none of them stayed on as permanent employees of the hotel they were working for over the winter.

H: Can you describe the employees who took these jobs?

TW: The people who went already had multi-year relationships with Grace. Some of them had been with us for three, four or six years, and so I was fairly confident that the rhythm of their lives is, you work a hard, long summer season, you make some money, and then you take the winter off, and then you return to Grace. And they were happy, they were good employees and, because they come back every year I had a sense that they valued us, hopefully, as good employers, too. And so it proved.

H: What have you learned? What would you do differently?

TW: It’s important to have an alignment of expectation. As you can imagine, the role that the people do at Grace was not necessarily exactly the same role that they would do in Soneva. We had head barmen who were just going to be barmen, but we also had assistant waiters who were going to be waiters. Some people had to take a little step up, some people had to take a little step down. And I think it’s important to make sure that there’s alignment of expectation around that point, between all parties up front.

H: Did the cohort come back with improved skills or new approaches?

TW: They absolutely did. Their confidence is higher, their capabilities are greater, they’ve seen and absorbed new and different ways of doing things, they’ve added to their skill sets, their professional skills and to their personal capabilities. It’s just a joy to see… Their presence in the team, their confidence … they are the leaders of that team whether or not they formally carry a manager title or not, they’re the people that have impact and influence within the team. That was true before, but I think it’s true now.

We sort of knew already that to undertake a mission like this is no small thing when maybe you’ve never worked outside Greece before. It takes an attitude of resilience, and an acceptance that for a while one might be uncomfortable in a new situation because everything is new, you’re outside your home country, you’re working with a different brand, it’s a different pace of operation, frankly the only thing that’s familiar is the personality and the expectation of the guests. But you’re working with people from many different cultures, because these people went to the Maldives and Thailand primarily, and so they were dealing with people, and cultures, and even operating equipment, it was all new. And the people who really thrived were those who had that mental attitude of resilience. And a couple of people were unhappy, they didn’t settle well. They had to dig deep… We really tried to stay as close as possible with these people while they were on the mission.

H: How would you advise other companies considering this type of labor agreement?

TW: It’s unusual in the industry to – let’s put it in inverted commas, “share people.” We share with hotels down the road, we share if there’s a need, we share banquet tables and chairs, sometimes we even share market data, but we rarely share talent.

I think a project like this is a way to ensure that talented people stay in our industry and stay in our group. You have to be imaginative, and you have to be open to a new model in that regard. And I think on that basis, it’s very important to pick your partners. It’s counterintuitive, because we were, if you like, letting them go, in order to build loyalty to get them back. They were going to go anyway because they’re not employed over the down season, so by creating an opportunity, while there was a risk, of course, and that risk will never go away, and in future, one or two people might stay and that wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for me.

It would only be a deal-breaker if the parties weren’t actually in good faith and a significant number stayed, I would have a problem with that.

The Grace Mykonos
The Grace Mykonos
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