Culture Change in the Hospitality Industry

OVERVIEW:

To build its culture from the ground up, Hilton Hotels tapped Arnowitz Culture Agency to create a community website that would involve employees, energize stakeholders, and support its worldwide brand initiatives.

BACKGROUND:

In 2009, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, the flagship brand of Hilton Worldwide, embarked on H360 – a journey to build a strategic global plan for its future. The goal: build a stronger global brand, maintain its leadership position, unify the brand message and culture, train employees to provide customer-focused service, and ensure Hilton’s continued relevance for the long term.

CHALLENGE:

Hilton Hotels is a truly global organization. Doing business across six continents, in 78 countries, with 3,000 general managers directing the efforts of more than 144,000 employees world wide, Hilton faced enormous logistical obstacles in communicating corporate initiatives to its globally dispersed team. Instead of consistently speaking with one voice, Hilton had created operational islands. Hilton turned to Arnowitz Culture Agency for a solution that would enable Hilton to speak with one voice around the world.

MEASURABLE RESULTS:

Since the launch of H360, Hilton has energized its staff around the globe with a newfound sense of community where employees share their best practices, learn new skills, and engage with corporate brand initiatives. Since its launch H360 has generated:

• 394,725 comments
• 494,060 photos uploaded
• 4,571 videos uploaded
• 2,203 suggestions contributed
• 34,352 stories shared
• Over 16 million page views
• 71% of site visits are from returning users

Monthly corporate challenges rolled out on H360 involve and engage staff in competitions that resulted in an overall customers service SALT score increase of 11%.

SOLUTION:

The H360 website links all 144,000 team members at Hilton to a centralized clearing-house of information, training resources, and corporate brand initiatives. The Hilton H360 site functions as an “online town hall” that encourages and enables grass roots input and buy-in. Brand training initiatives were moved online to support service and skills, product knowledge expertise, and training of managers to transform them from employees into Hilton Brand Ambassadors. Integration of social media tools make the site an authentic, completely transparent online community that supports employee engagement with the brand training.

Research and Assessment
A brand assessment and research program focused on brand standards, corporate culture and values to build a solid foundation for the work that follows. Key stakeholders were interviewed, focus groups uncovered insights, and phone surveys and web-based questionnaires were used to gather information.

Strategic Messaging
By aligning our messaging with Hilton’s key brand pillars, we were able to support company-wide corporate initiatives, signature touch points, targeted guest engagements and improved service delivery standards. To ignite the soul of Hilton, the H360 website leverages Hilton’s “Blue Energy” program designed to create an authentic culture embraced by team members, managers and brand executives.

Cross media, company-wide 
To communicate and support the Hilton brand, strengthen brand culture and training, we implemented the H360 a program across all media, including print, video, the web, Twitter, and Facebook.

Skill Delivery
Separate training sections focus on skill building and service training for front office operations, sales, resorts, and operations.

Designed for sharing
Completely transparent, the site encourages authentic employee interaction, enabling employees to post videos that share best practices, success stories, and the results of their initiatives implemented at the local level.

Recognize and reward
Built-in in tools enable executives to recognize leaders and employees for their efforts, and reward them on a public platform shared by their peers.

Designed for adoption
To ensure Hilton managers could successfully implement the H360 program, Arnowitz Culture Agency created a road show kit to roll out a corporate communication plan. Training materials, motivational videos, and interactive games promoted enrollment, engagement and uptake by Hilton’s team members.

Future Proof
With ongoing input from staff, Hilton is able to maintain the H360 site as a true, self-sustaining online community. By making it easy to update, Hilton ensures H360 is communicated 365 days a year. Built-in tools make it simple for Hilton to perform data capture, and gather feedback to support improvements, room for growth, and strategic direction in the future.