HOTELIER: You mentioned being able to hire professionals part-time for six months — can you share more about that or even the potential of student internships in the wellness sector?

Paul: I think there’s an initiative that the government has placed that students can work part-time. It would be good to tap into — not for therapists — but other roles and for learning. We would definitely tap into that.

Sharon: Yes definitely — because of the bigger picture of hotels looking into how they can encourage people into the hospitality industry anyway.

Paul: It’s become more important to showcase that this is a great profession, because with the wellness growth, we’re competing with our own internal dimensions. There’s fitness, which is making good money and is a good career, there’s beauty, or workplace wellness. There’s lot of other spheres growing faster than us and it’s going to pull our own talent as well. We’re not the fastest growing dimension within the wellness industry — there’s a lot of other attractive, appealing careers going. We’ve done a wellness course at the Emirates Academy where we’ve put in a course for the students who will graduate to be hotel managers or some other profession. We’re in development to continue that and offer classes for therapists and other professionals, but now it’s for currently registered students at the Emirates Academy.

Galina: We have an internship programme with European colleges, and a lot are coming for their practical for three months or six months… but mainly other departments — not in the spa. In the spa if you get anyone, it will be receptionists. If you look at the European education, spa and wellness is not really covered, because normally it’s third-party who runs spas there.

Paul: It’s a good point that you mentioned. Most of the growth is in a hotel spa, that’s why the staff is increasing. So we need to to try and attract colleagues from your own hotel to the spa… it’s a nice environment, it’s got more opportunities, it’s good to tap into your own hotel group for talent. We moved a front office manager to an assistant manager in the spa at Madinat Jumeirah; she has no spa experience but she has all the other elements for us to groom her.

Sharon: It’s always been the case that people have looked to take people from the spa to other departments rather than other departments to the spa. So it’s interesting that we can flip it around. Sometimes you do find when you start to dig a bit deeper that there are candidates within the hotel teams that actually have got other skills; they just for some reason decided to step away from being a massage therapist. We’re finding that a lot now, and we can encourage them back. When we’ve got peak time, we can move them across for a bit of time — not change the path that they’re on but give them an additional route to look at. That could work quite well.

Galina: We have a programme in the hotel called Inter-Departmental Training, so when people complete six months they are free to train in any other department and our internal movements are quite high. It’s nice for people to have the chance to experience [the spa], and we get quite a few staff from other departments. I’m sure that in every hotel there are programmes like this.

HOTELIER: How do you think you can encourage people to remain within the spa department?

Sharon: It’s interesting, people always think that it’s money or incentives that keeps people rooted, but every year when we do our annual survey with the team members it all comes down to support, the relationship, and the investment we make into them in terms of education and development. We’ve got a range of different management training programmes and are now involving the whole wellness component into those training programmes, which never really happened before. We’re seeing a lot of traction both across the hotel teams, so they’re having more exposure to what wellness is about which gives them a more rounded approach to their jobs. Getting our wellness teams (particularly supervisory level upwards) involved in the hotel training programmes is also helping develop their skills and make them more rounded as leaders. We’ve always done it, but it’s something over the last year to two years where we’ve taken a much deeper focus.

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