Communication is the biggest challenge companies face in employee engagement, a Human Resource Roundtable in Singapore heard last week.
Hosted by Cornell-Nanyang Institute of Hospitality Management (CNI) and Watson Wyatt, the global consulting firm focused on human capital and financial management, the roundtable had participation from companies such as Raffles Hotels and Resorts, Raffles Medical Group, Marriott International, Carlton Hotels, Pan Pacific Hotels Group, Six Senses Resorts & Spas and Millenium & Copthorne.
The participants also realised they had more similar than different challenges and these included senior management involvement, employee involvement, employee fatigue, challenges of carrying responsibility and the diversity of their employees in terms of language, culture and skill sets.
Most discussion was centred around communication and how best to get key messages across to employees. It was agreed that over-communication was a necessity rather than a negative.
No one means of communications was satisfactory; different means were appropriate for different groups of employees. Town hall meetings, online messaging, wrap sessions, department meetings, committees, education of managers and supervisors were common methods for communicating with employees.
Direct communication was also deemed important. Raffles Hotels communicates with all its employees by personal letter in the language most meaningful to the employee when it comes to important issues.
"Short, simple and clear messages" lent towards the most successful results, commented Regan Taikitsadaporn, Vice President of Human Resources for Marriot International.
Linda Scully, Corporate Director of Human Resources for Carlson Hotels, described its principal drivers of communications as "trust, the alignment of pride and ownership; and recognition, which can be rewarded in many ways more than simply money". For example, recognition and learning came from TGIF afternoons once every month held with the General Manager of the hotel, who updates the employees on plans and happenings; similarly, with the CEO at the corporate office.
Engagement surveys were still considered critical, despite the necessity to reduce costs within all the hotel groups.
Several of the hotels discussed the importance of engaging the unions and building a relationship with them to the extent that the unions took responsibility for critical communications along with the hotel. This was important to get unions working with the hotels, not against them. Evelyn Goh, Vice President of Talent Management for the Pan Pacific Hotels Group went as far as to say that the unions "are an extension of the HR function".
Most of the participants were inspired to come up with more novel ways of communication. For example, the Raffles Medical Group communicates with its staff doctors in person, and through communiqués posted in the Doctors Lounge, where the doctors are more receptive to corporate messages than by email or written communication.
On issues of recognition, a divide between ‘front of house', ‘back of house' and ‘middle of house' is immediately apparent as the ‘front of house' staff receives immediate recognition from customers, whereas the rest of the employees lack that confirmation.
Participants concurred that driving recognition through teams, across teams, was an important part of their function. A popular way of achieving this was by encouraging nominations where both the nominee and the nominated were recognised.
A notable way of engagement mentioned by one hotel group was that the senior manager spent an hour of time every Friday with their immediate reports, the purpose of which is to discuss only their intended career path and matters related to furthering their career, not projects or work related issues.
4Hoteliers is the "Official Daily News" of WIT09 www.webintravel.com - October 20-23, 2009 Suntec Convention Centre, Singapore 
