Employee Engagement to Impact
1) Overview
Our client is a large global organization in the hospitality industry currently with 450+ hotels around the globe.
In 2011, the Brand had 210 Hotels, all in the Americas. The Brand Team was anticipating aggressive growth over the next five years, primarily through first time entry into new markets globally.
Believing that maintaining a consistent culture and employee engagement was the key to successful franchising of their brand to independent operators, as well as franchisee and company profitability, they searched for a solution that could provide that result.
ACA, a long time Hilton Brands’ culture, communications and training partner was tasked by the Brand team to provide the solution.
2) Program Description – ACA Culture Change/Corporate Cause
ACA implemented Corporate Cause/Culture Change program that consisted of two program parts:
Web Application
- Solicit or share/collect story content directly in the application via mobile or desktop browsers.
- Solicit or share/collect story content from other existing corporate resources (SharePoint, Facebook, blogs, Slack, etc.)
- Display/explore ‘best of’ current content via mobile or desktop browsers to support Corporate Communication needs (Culture Change, Corporate Cause, Employee Engagement, PR, Investor relations, Sales, Training, Executive Presentations, Culture Change, etc.)
- Content displayed is only current and/or ‘evergreen’ content for required organizational topics
- Topic tagging is completely customizable for every organization.
Program Services (all services included in subscription)
- Curate the ‘best of’ content from any corporate media channel or repository
- Produce/edit the content into best quality viewing formats
- Keep content on web site current and accurate
- Search and/or solicit story content from all any department, manager, executive, division and/or brand.
- Provide the content in required formats for use—PowerPoint slides, blog content, Facebook posts, corporate intranet sites, edited video material, slideshows, PDFs, etc.
- Support services for users adding content and user looking for content
- Provide additional media production services for creating original story content as required
- Provide communication campaign consulting for any digital channel and/or social network (proven recipes that drive greater impact and results).
3) Goals
In partnership with the Brand Team client, ACA’s responsibility was to provide a solution that ensured:
- Consistency. A consistent, global implementation of company culture values and actions.
- Global Reach. Strengthening, growing, sustaining that culture through an easily accessible online community that would reach all their global locations.
- CC Engagement. A moderated environment that would inspire engagement, pride and Brand loyalty through involvement in CR/community programs.
- Improved Results. A complete “solution” that promoted, built and improved CC program results.
4) Tactics
- Engagement. ACA Solicited, moderated, encouraged and curated CC content creation from employees worldwide.
- User content impact. Experiencing user-generated CC stories through the voices, activities and eyes of employees provided inspiration and interaction.
- Build local champions. Leveraged the utilization of each hotel property’s on site culture committee as company CC champions.
- Global alignment. Improve alignment of Brand’s Culture program (CARE) with their CC programs across all hotels in all countries.
- Measurement. Created new metric collection and analytics reporting.
- Reward, Recognition, Celebration. ACA created new, and strengthened existing, reward, recognition and celebration programs, incentivizing greater participation.
5) Results
DoubleTree Global engagement is widespread:
- 16,305 users from 100+ countries, 3,276 cities
- Over 2.6 million pages viewed
- 25,700+ photos and videos uploaded
- 14,000+ stories shared
- 1,800+ best practices shared
- 20,000+ comments adde
6) Improvements
- Increased Program participation from 70% to 100% at 425 Hotels worldwide (while onboarding 200 new hotels to the system).
- Volunteer hours increased 21% from 2013 to 2014 (to 76,000+ hours)
- Per employee dollar donation rose 40% (to $600,000 per quarter by 2014)
- Voluntary participation in the CARE Community grew from 0 to 16,000+ users in three years (year 1: 2,800, year 2: 11,454, year 3: 16,300)
7) Additional Business Benefits
- Consistency/Alignment. A widely dispersed global community of shared vision, mission, purpose.
- User-generated Best Practices. Enhanced business results from facilitating user ‘best practice’ solutions from entire global organization.
- Improved Performance. Better performance scores through a small investment of employee time.
- Retention. Improved employee loyalty and retention through greater job satisfaction and engagement.
- Breaking silos. Breaking down global isolation through a common community, instant website and content translations.
- Communication, Ability to leverage, integrate and synchronize company communications, metrics and knowledge channels.
