Hannah has called India home for the last 9 years and has recently moved back to Australia and joined Quantaco’s Sydney team as Head of People and Culture. Hannah’s responsibilities involve making Quantaco an even better workplace by attracting, retaining, and developing the best talent possible.
This is done by creating a workplace that is both productive and enjoyable through developing policies and programs that support Quantaco’s people and culture (P&C) goals. In this post, Hannah will be sharing more about her job role, and how a healthy culture can give rise to hospitality success.
Overcoming Challenges in Creating a Culture of Success
Hannah shared what challenges can be ahead for growing businesses aiming to make positive cultural changes by saying, “It’s asking the business to “slow down to speed up.” Right now, we’re growing fast but we need our people and culture strategies to catch up. To do this, we need to take a step back to ensure the strategies align with our corporate values, provide the best solutions, and are scalable in their implementation. Only then can we charge full speed ahead.”
Luckily this is what Hannah likes the most about her job role. She has spoken passionately about this by saying, “I love being able to create a positive change that can impact our people. With my role I’m able to create a people and culture strategy from the ground up. This means I can be as innovative and creative as I can be.”
Nurturing A Healthy Culture in The Hospitality Industry
Hannah has worked across Australia and India which has allowed her to develop a deep understanding of the importance of culture in business. She has also gained a unique perspective on international P&C strategy and has seen how critical the development and execution of a strong people agenda is on organisations regardless of where they operate or what business they are in.
Hospitality is a people business and success is often born out of nuturing a strong focus on talent. Here’s how Hannah aims to nurture a healthy culture in the industry, including in Quantaco.
Create a sense of belonging
One of the most important things is to create a sense of belonging for your employees. This means making them feel valued, respected and included to unlock performance-enhancing behaviours. You can do this by creating opportunities for employees to get to know each other, celebrating employee milestones, and promoting a culture of diversity and inclusion.
Encourage open communication
Building workplace trust is the first building block to a positive culture. And you can build trust by encouraging open communication. This means creating an environment where employees feel comfortable speaking up, sharing their ideas, giving feedback, and managers model open communication themselves.
Recognise and reward employees
Those in service roles are often customer-facing, which can be a challenging job. That’s why it’s important to recognise and reward employees for their hard work. Appreciating their contributions will make them feel that you’re invested in their success. Recognising them in relevant ways like public praise, awards, or bonuses will help them have the mental bandwidth to extend more positivity and quality service to your customers.
How P&C Initiatives Impact a Company’s Bottomline
While people expenditures like wages can represent the biggest variable cost to a hospitality venue, they should be viewed as an investment area.
A strong company culture will reduce turnover and the related recruitment and training costs associated with new hires. In fact, having a strong Employee Value Proposition (EVP) can increase new hire engagement by 30%, and reduce turnover by 70%.
By defining growth and development paths, you boost engagement levels and motivate employees to stay in their roles. For an industry that is struggling with a labour shortage, retention and motivation are key.
Understanding your employees’ journey, and providing support and recognition will increase engagement, lower turnover, and result in better productivity and improve profitability.
