BEST PRACTICE: Going for Gold

Dusit Thani Dubai recently became the only company in the region to hold Investors in People's Silver award. Next year it is going for gold...

Investors in People (IIP) Accreditation provides a framework of best practice aimed at transforming business performance through investment in people. The accreditation is outcome focused, helping businesses to outline their goals, while providing independent assessments to track a company’s progress.

The framework provides proven, improved financial performance and profitability, along with increased colleague loyalty and advocacy leading to higher staff retention and reduced recruitment costs.

A minimum 36 standards need to be met to achieve the Investors in People accreditation. A business can then elect to strive for Bronze, Silver or Gold status. The Silver accreditation alone requires that 76 standards are met on top of the basic 36 foundation standards.

Rational and Objective
Having achieved foundation IIP accreditation in 2011, becoming the first hotel in the Dusit International Group and company in the region to gain standard certification, Dusit Thani Dubai raised its IIP ambitions with the arrival of HR director, Mike Audrain, who saw the standard as a foundation for achieving international best practice, which married well with the hotel’s overall business objectives as well as the group’s internal HR strategy of positive customer reviews and colleague opinion reviews.

As Audrain recalls: “The objective was to bring the HR department up to an international standard using the Investors in People framework in unison with the hotel’s HR strategy based on the four pillars of happiness, engagement, identity and development.

“Consequently our goal was ‘happiness’ for the colleagues; improving engagement through social activities; creating an identity using the vision and values of the company and developing colleagues through yearly and half-yearly appraisals that provided meaningful feedback and concluded with an agreed outcome.”

The HR team created a succession plan [a process of identifying and developing internal people with the potential to fill key business leadership positions in the company] not only for the hotel’s top management team but for every colleague in the hotel with aspirations of climbing the ranks, while offering them a plan of how this could
be achieved.

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Concept and investment
Achieving the IIP Silver accreditation required meeting 76 standards on top of the 36 the hotel had reached in gaining foundation IIP status. The financial investment involved in setting up the framework with Investors in People was “minimal” but the hotel did commit to a huge investment in terms of time.

As the hotel’s staff are mainly expats with different cultural backgrounds and needs, its aim was to understand what IIP meant to each colleague and bridge any differences between colleagues working in different sectors of the business, while ensuring they understood the overall strategy of the company and how they, as important members of the team, could contribute to its success.

This was achieved by interviewing every team member; a top-to-bottom approach as Audrain calls it.

“Within 12 months we had the highest score on an opinion survey the hotel had ever experienced, which jumped by 8-9 points and was evidential by colleagues telling us they felt happy and engaged,” he says.

“We set a succession plan not just for the hotel’s top management but for all colleagues in the hotel. Each succession plan outlined colleagues’ aspirations and put steps in place to help them achieve those goals.”

In Practice
Collaboration and communication were key to the hotel’s IIP strategy. “IIP is essentially a communication process that everyone understands,” says Audrain. “This meant communicating from the top-to-the-bottom and then from bottom-up again, because often it’s in the middle of that chain where things can become misunderstood.”

As such, the hotel took steps to communicate its aims on a daily basis. “We ensured each colleague understood what we were trying to achieve as a business, why we had those aims and, ultimately, what was in it for each of them," Audrain adds.

Basic measurements were established to record and quantify the hotel’s progress, including customer service matrix scores and hotel retention figures.

The hotel also implemented town hall meetings and a ‘colleague of the month’ to motivate the team as well as establishing an IIP meeting. In addition, fun social engagement activities such as the team’s Winter Olympics were organised as part of the IIP strategy, which also contributed to the hotel’s CSR commitments.

The Results to Date
In total 58 colleagues, including managers, EXCOM and colleagues made up the sample percentage interviewed by IIP, which lead to Dusit Thani Dubai’s Silver Accreditation.
According to Audrain, meeting the Silver standard has allowed the hotel to achieve staff retention rates of 10-12%, which he estimates is one of the lowest turnover rates in the hospitality sector, resulting in cost savings, “that run into the hundreds of thousands”.

The implementation of the framework has also delivered a rise in employee satisfaction and helped the property meet all its financial and hotel key performance indicators (KPIs) for 2012.

The hotel is now working towards achieving IIP Gold accreditation, which Audrain confirms is the target within the next year.

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Prateek Kumar, General Manager, Dusit Thani Dubai
According to Kumar, Dusit Thani Dubai had already developed a programme of staff development and engagement in line with what IIP offered before its accreditation in 2011.

“What IIP provided was a focus, a framework for the hotel to assess and manage the process,” Kumar says. “At the same time we wanted to be known as the industry’s preferred employer and IIP provided an opportunity to display that to prospective employees, as well as engaging our own colleagues and helping us develop their future.”

Kumar highlights that Dusit International has called 2013 ‘its year of expansion’ adding that over the last two-to-three years, the team has worked hard assembling a corporate office so that it's ready for this growth.

“The aim for the next three-to-five years is to double/triple the size of the company. This year alone we’ve opened in Abu Dhabi, will open our first hotel in Africa (Nairobi) and one in India at the end of the year, plus there will be another hotel in Dubai and a couple in Qatar,” he says. “The resource we need most is the one most scarce; people. IIP will help us attract that resource.”

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David Dale, Operations Director, Investors in People, UK
According to Dale, IIP is successful on several levels. “It was started around 22 years ago in the recession, which makes it very suitable for today’s economic climate,” he says.
“Organisations are using the framework as part of their business strategy because the results are not merely academic, they are proven. When a business sees results, it acts on them.”
Currently there are 20,000 organisations from 70 plus countries engaged in IIP worldwide.
“The framework works across cultures and sectors of business and can be used for a small business or multinationals,” Dale adds.

Dale believes the framework is successful for companies such as Dusit Thani Dubai because it provides ongoing support as a business develops. “It is not a tick-the-box accreditation, which you receive and then dip back into a few years later. It is used continually. There are IIP companies that began the process 15 years ago and are still engaged today,” he says.

“More importantly,” Dale continues, “IIP deals with people. This is particularly important in the hospitality industry; hotels are in the people business after all.”

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Norma Flores, Cost Controller, Dusit Thani Dubai
Flores is a Dusit Thani Dubai colleague that has benefitted from the hotel’s engagement with the IIP framework. “We discussed a training plan for the career development of each colleague and then received individual training to develop both personal skills and career progression,” she explains.

Revealing the rigorous assessment process of the IIP audit, Flores was required to attend an interview with an assessor in which she was given complete freedom and privacy to express her view of the business. “They asked questions such as how was the team managed and what training was on offer for colleagues,” she adds.

Asked whether the process had helped her grow at the company, she describes her own progressive career path at the hotel. “I joined as casual staff but then the hotel developed my talents,” she says.

“I started in housekeeping as a room attendant but was given the opportunity of training, which allowed me to move to receivables in Finance and then on to cost controller. Currently, Flores has a one-to-three year plan for progression with financial accounts training on offer.