Christopher Nassetta of Hilton won the 49th spot on Employees’ Choice Award for Highest-Rated CEOs. We were thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down with Matthew Schuyler, CHRO of Hilton, to chat about what drives them, what they get right, what challenges they see in front of them – and how they feel about winning a spot on the list!
Glassdoor: First of all congratulations. Were you guys pretty excited when you heard the news that you made the 2017 Employees’ Choice Awards for Highest Rated CEOs?
Schuyler: We were and we remain excited. It's great company to keep, so to speak, and we're delighted where we stack up. Of course we don’t do what we do to make these lists, but it sure is great to get some outside acknowledgement of what we believe to be the case internally.
Glassdoor: What does leadership mean to you?
Schuyler: We could take a long time on that one, but I will try to keep it short. Obviously it means a myriad of things, but mostly the way that I think of leadership is translating vision and planning to reality – and the job of a leader is to both envision the possibilities and to have a vision for the future and to help connect the dots within any type of team construct to achieve that reality. Obviously part of that in a corporate setting is building teams that perform, inspiring everyone around you as a leader, and essentially motivating them to work together to turn the vision to reality. The Hilton much is the same relative to that broader definition. I think we believe the most effective leaders are those that can translate the vision to reality, the vision of our company, the future that we see with our brands into the reality of those brands performing in the marketplace. With that comes a lot of effort and a lot of energy as you might imagine in engaging workforce and making sure that they have what they need in order to be successful as well. In short, that is what leadership means to me.
Glassdoor: What do you guys do specifically at Hilton to really foster that employee trust and engagement?
Schuyler: I’ll go all the way to the beginning. It starts with recruitment. We need to be really great at recruiting talent. That we believe is the number one job of our leaders is to recruit great talent. Once you recruit great talent, then introducing them through recruitment process and ultimately the onboarding process, the strategy, the mission, the vision, the priorities of company, our values is where leadership sort of kicks in. Recruit and then motivate through our shared values and purpose. Our purpose in short is really about hospitality. We believe it's our mission to be the most hospitable company in the world. To deliver on our original founder’s – our namesake's goal is to spread the light and warmth of that hospitality around the world.
“That is the higher calling, the purpose that we rally our teams around and ask our leaders to be spokespeople for – and it sort of starts from there.”
Recruit, motivate through purpose, give engaging work, and make sure that you're giving feedback and recognition along that work journey. That is really how it manifests itself here at Hilton.
Glassdoor: This is kind of a similar question but if you have anything to kind of add to this. How do you guys really go about building a great company culture?
Schuyler: It really starts with having a great work environment. We want to make sure that we're the most hospitable company in the world, not just for our guests who visit our properties but also for our team members. We work hard to create programs and initiatives and an environment where our team members feel great about the company and great about their spot in the company and great about working at the company. Then it all translates into great guest service.
“When you're feeling good about your job, then you’re going to deliver that joyful hospitality to your guests.”
We have great benefits that we offer to all of our team members. We have best-in-class programs around things like parental leave and time off and advance scheduling and working environments. We do a lot of make sure that our back up house meaning the behind the scenes of the hotel are just as good as the front of house or the guest facing aspects of the properties Emily so having a great environment back at house where you can recharge and recoup and re-energize so you can head back out to front of house and be with our guests is really important for u so having great locker rooms, great restaurants for our team members back of house, a great environment where they can kick their feet up and relax a little bit, maybe catch up on the news, check their phones, whatever the case may be. Having that great environment in the back of the property is really key to creating this engaged workforce.
Corporately we do so many things to connect our team members to one another at our corporate offices, like events. This week, for example, is the Team Member Appreciation Week here at Hilton. All around the world we have thousands of events going on to celebrate our team members, and I just came from our McLean office – our headquarters. Day 1 of Team Member Appreciation Week Barbecue down in the lobby of our building where we served all of our team members barbecue and they sat outside and enjoyed barbecue lunch today. Small thing but big in the notion of we want: to say thanks and make sure that everyone feels really appreciated as part of an engaging work culture and an engaging work environment.
Glassdoor: One of the things that I wanted to ask about too was of course when you have good leadership it's not because there's just one person at the top. How do you and your team really work with the management to make sure that there's good leadership throughout the entire company?
Schuyler: We do a lot to develop our leaders and our managers. We have a very defined curriculum that we both encourage our leaders to work their way through and in some instances mandate that they go through in order to make it to the next level. We also measure leadership across the entire global enterprise. Once a year we do a formal global team member survey, and just to give you some perspective on that: 90% of our team members completed that survey last year. That is hundreds of thousands of data points that we use to measure lots of different facets of working at Hilton, including leaders. From those scores we compile what we call a leadership index, which gives all of our leaders and managers scores relative to how they're doing in the eyes of the team around them. We’re measuring things like what is the morale of your team? Are they engaged in their work? Do they feel good about where the company is heading? Do they feel good about you as a leader? Do they feel like they are looked after for their next career move? Do they feel like they can be themselves at work? Is this an inclusive work environment? All that is measured and then many other things are measured as part of that survey. Then we get those scores to our leaders, and we actually make that part of their bonus cycle for the year. In part they are rewarded for how they perform as a leader. Mostly it's getting them the feedback so that they can be better leaders.
“I’d say a key ingredient at Hilton is continuous feedback cycle of asking for and receiving feedback on how you're doing as a leader.”
Glassdoor: Then what do you think – in your personal opinion or even from what you've heard from employees – what do you think is the best part about working at Hilton?
Schuyler: I’d say without a doubt it's the family atmosphere and this notion of working together as a team to serve people at our properties and to provide them with meaningful guest experiences that they'll always remember.
“Moments that matter have a tendency to rally a team.”
For us we have hundreds of thousands of moments that matter in our properties every single day. Think about the fact that we've got nearly 5,000 properties and over 800,000 hotel rooms around the world in 105 countries and growing. You think about your typical hotel stay. You obviously go to your room, you mull around a little bit. You check out the lobby and so forth. Think about all the opportunities that we have to make a difference in your day. That is sort of the rallying point of our teams to deliver great service in those moments that matter and to do so with people that you enjoy working with that is really neat part of our hospitality industry is you're working with people that love to provide hospitality, that love to serve other people – and so they're a joy to be around and they’re fun to work with and around. We try to capture the essence of that fun environment by creating a great atmosphere around them and great programs that support them. Having fun and being great at what they do and all of that is sort of work in concert to allow us to deliver that great guest experience. All of that is really the best, those are the best reasons why working here is so fun and great.
Glassdoor: You mentioned earlier that one of the things that is really important to your organization is that you need to be recruiting really great talent. Do you guys have any kind of best practices you can share around that – without giving away your secret sauce, of course?
Schuyler: Honestly it's a bit of science and it's a bit of art. The science of course is what you'd expect in a recruitment process where you're looking at resumes and you're looking at backgrounds and you're looking at skills and you're trying to figure out what skills do I need for this job versus what skills does this individual bring to the table? That is the science, and we're quite good at that as most big companies are. We have big recruitment machinery that scans resumes and brings forward the best slate of talent to look at relative to roles that we have open and so forth.
I’d say equally if not more important is the art of recruitment where leaders need to really have a feel for the type of people that they want around them and make that a part of their recruitment process.
“The best teams, of course as we know, are the most diverse teams – and the best environments are the most inclusive environments, so you as a leader are empowered to build a diverse team and encouraged to do so and rewarded to do so. Because a diverse team can provide the best service because of the different skills and different moments that come into play. Having the same of everything isn’t going to allow you to provide the best guest service.”
It’s not so much a secret as it is how we go about that. It's really leaders who have either grown up in this industry or grown up with Hilton or know us really well because they've been here for a while or are the right leaders relative to the task at hand and so forth applying that scientific part together. That is truthfully the secret sauce if you would. Having the right managers and leaders: the science and art.
“I would say the obsession of making sure that you have the right people is sort of uniformly felt around here because in the end the absolute most critical component of our guest experience is our people.”
You can’t deliver hospitality by just having just a nice hotel. It’s easy to build a nice hotel, relatively speaking. We can all build nice hotels. It’s the service within the hotel that makes all the difference in your stay. Our leaders know that, and they are therefore encouraged to blend that science and art to get the best talent.
Glassdoor: The other side of that coin too is making sure not only that you're bringing those great people in but making sure that they stay so what are kind of your best practices or tips around retaining talent?
Schuyler: It starts with this mantra of knowing that our team members are the heart of our success. We actually call that the Heart of Hilton. Our team members are the heart of Hilton. All of our leaders sort of wear that on our short sleeves knowing that our team members are the heart of what makes us different and, we think, best. We retain them by showcasing that, showing them that we care. Showing them that we're interested in them. Supporting them through programs and initiatives that allow them to achieve their career goals and their life goals because you can’t have a tradeoff. It won’t last. A lot of companies enforce a tradeoff and eventually it breaks down. We believe the opposite. We believe we should not force a tradeoff. We believe we should essentially force you to integrate your life by allowing you to by showcasing that it’s okay.
Bring your whole self to work. We want to create the most inclusive environments, as I’ve been describing to you, that allow everyone to bring every aspect of themselves to work, because if you don’t do that eventually, as I mentioned, there's going to be breakdown. We also encourage our people to be very vocal about their goal. What do you want to do next? What are your career ambitions? How can we help? We’re very honest and forthright with respect to next opportunities and then having a bit of vision as to what you can achieve here ultimately. Most of our highest executives grew up in this industry, and many of them started their careers in a hotel many years ago.
The point of that story is that they grew up in various roles along their career journey to reach the highest levels in our company, and that is the story that we like to tell to all of our team members: that you can achieve your career goals here. We just need to know what they are, and we'll be honest with you in return. They require a little flexibility on your part. It will definitely require flexibility on our part.
“Together, let's achieve your career goals, because you're going to be happier. You’re going to be happier. You’re going to work harder and provide better guest services as a result.”
We’d love to retain you because we have spent a lot of time teaching you and educating you and learning together with you on how we can better at what we do. It’s better to retain that than to lose it, and so it's a win-win. I guess that’s a pretty simple way of thinking of it: We invest in you. You invest in us. That is the value proposition back and forth and it's our job as a company to have great programs initiatives in an environment that is engaging.
Glassdoor: I think that about takes us through all of the questions that I have. Was there anything else that you wanted to add on to that?
Schuyler: No, it's great to share all this. We’re awfully proud of the environment we have created over time. There’s more to go. You’re never done. The world of work is evolving very rapidly, and we are doing our best to stay on top of that and make sure we're providing more programs and initiatives that make sense. One of the things that we're doing is acknowledging the fact that we're all kind of suffering from digital overload, so we're constantly reminding our team members that you need to take a break.
“Take your vacation. Check out of work for a while.”
We’ve got a really cool program in that regard called Go Hilton where we actually encourage and allow our team members to stay at our properties for a very minimal fee and massive discount, in other words. That sort of goes through the psyche of making sure that they're taking care of themselves and enjoying our products at the same time. It’s just another example of how we really encourage a well engaged and well balanced team.
Glassdoor: That sounds like an awesome perk to have.
Schuyler: It is great because there's 5000 hotels to choose from from around the world! A lot of our team members – hundreds of thousands of them – are participating in this program. We're getting all kinds of thank yous and pictures back, honeymoons in Bali and visits to New York City and San Francisco, really cool social media sharing of the Go Hilton stories from around the world. It’s pretty cool to watch.
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