“Engagement is not a fad; at Hilton, engagement is core to our strategy,” said Hilton Worldwide EMEA vice president of human resources Ben Bengougam, during his presentation at the HR Summit in Dubai in November 2016.
It’s something he clearly believes in, and Bengougam has a powerful role to play in Hilton Worldwide — with 65,000 employees in EMEA across 65 countries, Bengougam is responsible for leading the HR function across the region.
The company’s values are integral to providing good service, and he says: “The key measurement is to go behind the well-managed corporate image — which we’re all employed to do well and do professionally — to what it really means for team members. If you were to ask team members, ‘What does all this mean to you? These values, this mission, this vision, how does this affect your job ?’ And if they quote some of the values and what it means to them, I know we’ve landed. Because it’s only really meaningful if our team members deliver to those values, to that vision and to that mission.”
Talking about recruitment, Bengougam doesn’t discount applicants with no experience in the hospitality industry. “It’s much more about personality and pre-disposition for service than it is about technical skills. I’m not saying that we don’t need experience, of course we do. But we also need people at the entry level who have that passion.”
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This inclusive approach to recruitment is why Hilton Worldwide has seen particular success in the Saudi Arabia, with its Mudeer Al Mustaqbal programme, which, as Bengougam confirms, is meant to fast-track talented youth into senior management positions through “development and on-the-job journeys”.
Bengougam says: “We are very successful in Saudi Arabia, including attracting females into our industry. While those programmes are very new and nascent, we are excited about the opportunity. We firmly intend to have Saudi general managers, UAE national general managers in our hotels in a horizon that we can see. And that includes female talent in these positions.”
He continues: “In this region, both an opportunity and challenge is being attractive and recruiting more local people, particularly in KSA but also in the UAE and Kuwait, and as we go further into Oman and Bahrain, developing a proposition that’s attractive to local talent. We have achieved quite a degree of success in that space but it is still a work in progress and we are just ahead of our game in terms of what we want to try and achieve in terms of number of local people working in our hotel.”
Once on board, the HR department does all it can to keep its employees engaged and developing skills, which Bengougam stresses constantly. “On the training side, the experience starts on day one,” comments Bengougam, who adds that the company delivers a “very good induction and orientation programme”. A majority of training at Hilton Worldwide is delivered both online and on the job. “Online we have Hilton University which includes basic skill programmes and all the way to MBA level; there’s nearly 3,000 programmes. It’s refreshed every year; we buy content from multiple suppliers including Harvard Business School all the way to a little company in South Africa that does our food and beverage training, and we develop some of it ourselves. That’s open to all our team members and it’s free for them.
“We try to impress upon our team members that they earn their own career — we’re here to help and we create the right environment but they ought to earn their own learning and career,” he says.
The company also works on its digital strategy engagement; for example, it launched a #HiltonWorkPerks programme on social media, for team members to share what they loved about their jobs with the company. “This is just one strand of a complex digitalisation strategy at the core of which is using communication media that our team members enjoy,” he explains.
From public social media forums to intranets, along with a new head of digital HR, Hilton Worldwide is taking its internal communication lines seriously, especially in light of the rise of the millennial employee in the workforce. Many team members in Hilton Worldwide’s recruitment team are millennials themselves, says Bengougam, “so they lead from the front”.
So what’s next for the HR team at Hilton Worldwide EMEA? “In this business, it’s never about doing a few things very well. It’s doing lots of different things,” he comments. “We are continuing to upgrade all of our talent processes so we go through a deep process of reviewing all our HR policies and certainly, at the very least, the core of our HR strategy.
“One of the new areas we want to do better in is wellness. All I can tell you is we are focused on developing a more balanced experience for team members in the workplace, taking into account the fact that they have a family, they need to have downtime, the intensity of work… we’ll look at nutrition, exercise, wellbeing and mindfulness in leadership,” he adds.
“We will continue our journey on leadership, and part of it is to be intolerant of poor standards. It’s to say what we expect our leaders to do and how we expect them to behave.
“And all of the work on talent, new programmes, new ways of developing millennials, MOOCs and availing ourselves of those much more, innovation and creativity around our HR programmes — all of that will be themes in 2017,” he adds.
I comment that this all sounds like a continuation of what Hilton Worldwide has championed for years now, and Bengougam concludes: “Saying ‘it’s a continuation of what you’re doing’ is a compliment, because this is constancy of purpose — we don’t have a new book every year. We have a similar book, just a new chapter. It’s powerful that people can see the journey, and it’s not just a fad.”
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