On Wednesday, March 16th our client FRHI Hotels & Resorts hosted a session at the Digital Signage Expo on “How to Connect and Engage a Global Workforce using Digital Communications”. The team has recently won the Ragan’s Employee Communications Award in the “Employee Engagement” category. Andrada Paraschiv and Alexandra Zeifman shared their knowledge on how to use digital channels to increase engagement in a hotel group.
The team started a partnership with Beekeeper in 2014 right after the merger of 3 hotel brands: Fairmont, Raffles and Swissotel. The new group (FRHI) faced the challenge of building the vision of ‘one’ for 45,000 employees in 120 properties around the world. And to address this challenge the company released FRHI Talk (Beekeeper). Beekeeper is a cross-device communication tool that combines messaging features with public content sharing feeds. Selected content can be also streamed on TVs in the places of employees’ gatherings.
Here are some interesting insights from the FRHI team on how they drive the tool adoption and participation:
1) Integrate in wider communication strategy
2) Support corporate and hotel initiatives in FRHI Talk
3) Show senior leaders how FRHI Talk could work for them
4) Run inter-hotel and individual competition. Hotels in the group love competing with each other. The company organizes quarterly contests in the tool to increase adoption rate and keep people using the tool
5) Send biweekly emails with the Talk highlights
6) Include info on the tool in orientation for the new colleagues
In the end of 2015 the company has conducted an internal survey of employee engagement and results showed that 61% of people said FRHI Talk makes them want to perform better in their job. And in the end, higher engagement leads to savings from higher retention.
