Holiday Inn 2012 Annual Report Download - page 33

Our talented People 31
OVERVIEW BUSINESS REVIEW GOVERNANCE
GROUP FINANCIAL
STATEMENTS
PARENT COMPANY FINANCIAL STATEMENTS OTHER INFORMATION
Ways of working
The Programme Office has been instrumental in driving a more
disciplined approach to the way we develop, design and deliver
projects to hotels. This year we refreshed our Ways of Working
to promote a more coordinated approach to project design and
developed the new IHG Way of Project Management – a bespoke
set of tools to improve the way we deliver projects to hotels. This
gives us a consistent and more effective approach to projects, and
project risk management.
Heart of house
Our Heart of house initiative has been a key project in 2012. When our
colleagues feel engaged, they deliver better service to our guests.
This is why Heart of house continues to be so influential in helping us
embed a BrandHearted culture. Heart of house is an integral part of
our People Tools. It is unique in the hotel industry – transforming the
traditional ‘back of house’ into the heart of our hotels – an inspiring,
inviting, place for employees to learn more about what’s happening
at IHG, their hotel brand, their hotel and in their teams. Heart of
house provides both a shared space for colleagues to communicate
and an improved working environment and supports our General
Managers in involving, inspiring and engaging their teams as brand
ambassadors. Nearly 1,000 of our hotels have now installed Heart
of house.
Celebrating service
Being BrandHearted is also about celebrating employees, and
recognising achievement is very important to us. That’s why every
year, through Celebrate Service week, we recognise our colleagues
for the great work they do to give our guests an enjoyable stay.
Celebrate Service week, which was instigated by, and run in
partnership with, the IHG Owners Association, saw more than 4,000
hotels participating in 2012. This has now become an important
driver of employee engagement – following this year’s event we found
99 per cent of employees at our corporate offices, central
reservations offices and managed and owned hotels and 98 per cent
of those working at participating franchised hotels said they felt
proud to work for a company that recognises its people in this way.
Making IHG a great place to work
Our People play a key role in delivering our brand promises day in,
day out. To achieve our Vision, we need to attract the very best
people, harness their passion and equip them with the right skills to
give our guests a truly great experience. Research shows that people
want to be treated as individuals and recognised for the great work
they do. In our employer brand we call this Room to be yourself and
this commitment is brought to life by four key promises:
Room to have a great start
Over the next few years, to meet our growth targets, we need to find
an additional 90,000 BrandHearted colleagues. People that really love
our Brands, can bring them to life though great service delivery. By
defining the specific behaviours needed to bring our Brands to life
and incorporating them in all our People Tools, we are able to recruit
people with the right attitude for the brand as well as the right
technical skills for the role. All new recruits attend an orientation
programme and have access to a new onboarding portal to ensure
they understand our Winning Ways, Room to be yourself and what
being BrandHearted really means, from the moment they join IHG.
To support our recruitment efforts and build upon our high levels
of employee engagement, we launched the Recommend a friend
scheme in 2012 to all franchised, managed and owned and leased
hotels and central reservations offices. This followed the success of
the launch of a similar scheme at our corporate offices, which saw
21 per cent of corporate hires coming through employee
recommendations – a 15 per cent increase from 2011.
One of the biggest recruitment challenges we face is how we
leverage the strength of our global brand, while being sensitive to
the local markets in which our hotels operate. In Greater China,
for example, we have created a new recruitment site in Mandarin and
have launched career pages on social networking platforms such as
Weibo and Renren (the number 1 social media platform amongst
college students in Greater China).
As further explained on page 35 as part of our Responsible Business
practices, the IHG Academy provides local people with the opportunity
to build and develop their skills and improve their employment
prospects. An IHG Academy is a collaboration between IHG hotels
or our corporate offices and local education providers and/or
community organisations and helps us create a pipeline of potential
recruits and future talent. We currently have over 150 IHG Academy
programmes in 37 countries around the world.
Room to be involved
We ask our employees and those colleagues working in our managed
hotels to participate in an employee engagement survey twice a year.
96 per cent of employees took part in our 2012 employee engagement
survey. The results were impressive with 94 per cent of respondents
saying they are proud to work for IHG – which is an all time high and
20 per cent higher than industry benchmarks. Better still, our
engagement scores continue to improve year-on-year and we have seen
an 18 percentage point increase across the Group in the last five years.
Highlights of our 2012 employee engagement survey results
(taking the average of the two annual surveys) include:
• our employees are more engaged than ever before with
78.6 per cent engagement for 2012 – 2.8 per cent higher than
the 2011 engagement average;
• 85 per cent say we are ‘living’ our Winning Ways; and
• we continue to beat external benchmarks – according to our
survey administrator, engagement scores for high-performing
companies have remained flat and service companies have had
a decrease of 1.5 per cent per year since 2010.
This year, for the first time we launched the employee engagement
survey to our franchise estate with 15 per cent of hotels pioneering
its use and a 4.7 percentage point increase in engagement in those
hotels between April and October.
By listening to our People and responding to their needs we can
drive better business results. This was shown in a study we
commissioned to examine the link between employee
engagement and hotel performance. This study found that the
difference in gross operating profit margin between hotels
with highly engaged people compared with those with lower
engagement can be as much as seven percentage points.
When we compared hotels where engagement had increased,
against those where it had not, we found that for every 5 percentage
point increase in engagement, there was, on average, 70 cents of
increased RevPAR. That means that for a 200-bed hotel this
RevPAR increase could generate an additional $50,000 of revenue
per annum.