In Conversation | Caroline Stevens, Chief People Officer of Minor Hotels

Based in Bangkok, Caroline Stevens is the Chief People Officer for Minor Hotels, where she is a key member of the senior management team that grew Minor Hotels from 6,000 employees and under 50 properties to over 35,000 people working at over 530 hotels and resorts across multiple brands.

Originally from the Seychelles, Caroline is a naturalized Australian citizen. She joined Minor Hotels in 2011 as Vice President – Human Resources from Hilton Worldwide where she was Vice President for the Middle East and Africa. In November 2019, she was awarded ‘Leader of the Year’ in The Investors in People Awards held at Old Billingsgate, London.

In this interview, Caroline talks about how Covid-19 has impacted the hospitality business model for new normal, challenges that she faces, and how her role as Chief People Officer has changed over the past year. She also shares the skillsets and mindsets needed to continue to operate, grow and evolve in a time of continuous disruption. An extended and edited transcript of the interview follows.

Leadership Advisory Inc: Covid-19 has affected every industry globally, and the hotel industry is among the hardest hit. A research by McKinsey has also suggested that recovery to pre-Covid-19 levels can take until 2023. How is this going to impact your business model for new normal?

Caroline Stevens: Among the unknowns around a vaccine or cure, how soon countries roll back border restrictions and how quickly economic recovery sets, we as hoteliers face many unanswerable questions, because there's just no precedent to something like the coronavirus pandemic.

For example, in Thailand we mostly rely on international tourism so without any business coming in, we have to look at other more domestic or niche revenue streams.

Major health crises such as the SARS epidemic (2003), the global financial crisis (2007/2008), the H1N1 pandemic (2009), and the MERS epidemic (2012), brought a succession of negative market situations. From shifting trends and expectations, to changing source markets and increasing operational costs - hotels had it tough.

COVID-19 will not be any different.

As we have come to realise, the asset-light model will become even more relevant for operators like us to recover and eventually maximise their profitability. Adaptive business models that enable rapid transformation will provide long-term competitive advantage because it will allow for organisational adjustments to address ambiguous business conditions.

It has become evident that customers have shifted their priorities about what they value most and what is important to them. They are now far more concerned about health and safety than brand and location. Consumers' desire to travel remains, but as operators we must provide the right hygiene, security, safety, and training programmes in place to guarantee our guests’ overall wellbeing. Moreover, the same effort must go into the wellbeing of our team members.

At Minor Hotels, we have introduced Anantara Stay With Peace of Mind and AvaniSHIELD programmes across all our properties. These build on the implementation of existing as well as new heightened and certified sanitation and hygiene measures.

Reassurance on strict cleaning and sanitation have become a customer’s expectation, and are thus now part of our brands’ marketing message.

This crisis is forcing everyone involved in hospitality to be more creative and resourceful.

We have had to rethink the way we operate and rebuild a leaner organization where all team members are multiskilled, focused on essential tasks, and learn to do more with less.

Leadership Advisory Inc: One of the biggest challenges CHROs face during this crisis is maintaining employee morale and helping them manage mounting levels of stress and anxiety. Are there particular challenges that you face? How do you address them?

Caroline Stevens: The COVID-19 pandemic has vastly accelerated the mental health crisis that already existed before it. For example, according to Thrive Global, 82% of Americans feel that the pandemic has had a bigger negative impact on their stress than any other event in history.

To tackle this emerging challenge, we developed various tools to help our team members identify and recognize their stress and anxiety triggers, as well as techniques to cope with these.

Our Learning and Development team created a reboarding workshop to re-familiarize returning team members with the company, bring them up-to-speed on relevant changes, integrate them back into the workplace culture, and empower them to get back to ‘business-as-usual’ as soon as possible. In times like this, team members feel vulnerable. Reboarding is just as much about an emotional reconnection. Effective reboarding allows you to gauge the state of your employee’s mental and emotional wellbeing; and help put in place safeguards and measures to ensure they feel looked after and engaged.

We also curated resources to help team members manage their stress and anxiety, to boost their immune system and remain focused, productive and successful as individuals and teams.

“As Chief People Officer it’s my role to enable business success through transformation from a people perspective...”

Leadership Advisory Inc: Many CHROs have also said this has been arguably the most stressful time, as they are facing unprecedented demands for communication, engagement, and caretaking in real time, while ensuring that senior leaders stay connected and supportive. How would you say the role of the CHRO has changed over the past year? To what extent has the pace and breath of change shaped your view of leadership?

Caroline Stevens: As Chief People Officer it’s my role to enable business success through transformation from a people perspective. In the last six months, we have been through a time of great uncertainty. Because of this, my team and I are helping our business to recognize and support the many different emotions and anxieties about the future and our new way of operating. This will help our teams recover as quickly as possible and come out stronger in the new normal.

With this crisis we really are in uncharted territory. COVID-19 has been a catalyst and forced us to go through a major cultural transformation in a matter of weeks rather than years. Our people and organizational agility have been put to the test and we have been pushed to reassess every aspect of our business.

As head of people and culture, we now need to engage a dispersed, virtual workforce and find new ways to create that sense of belonging the conventional work location once offered. We need to be better equipped and become better communicators to convey clear and consistent ‘human’ messages to our leaders and team members. We need to build up virtual management and digital competencies and provide the tools to support collaboration without jeopardizing performance.

Leadership Advisory Inc: Around the world, economies are cautiously reopening. Impact on work is changing not just where people work, but fundamentally alter what work is performed and how we perform it. What skillsets and mindsets will be needed to continue operate, grow and evolve in a time of continuous disruption?

Caroline Stevens: As an international hospitality company competing on the global stage, Minor Hotels faces faster and bigger challenges as well as opportunities. Understanding and tackling these ever-changing dynamics requires new skills and behaviours our team members need to be equipped with to transform themselves and be ready to perform in a disrupted world. As our chairman and founder Bill Heinecke says, nowadays it is “disrupt or be ready to be disrupted.” There is no way around it.

To come up with these new behaviours and attributes, we have taken into consideration globalization, technological disruption and changing customer preferences to take our team members on a journey of self-growth and development.

We, as a company, can only be as strong as our weakest link.

The art of doing things differently, challenging the status quo or developing a growth mindset are all ways to evolve in times of disruption. Being comfortable to try and fail knowing you can learn from it and use what you have learned to succeed is vital in our people.

Even before the crisis, we had started fostering more agile leaders who can shift their mindset and “let go” of old beliefs and paradigms to thrive in a dynamic environment. While this is helping us weather this storm, it also shows us how crucial it is to further develop new mindsets and capabilities in our leaders to transform themselves, their teams, and the organization.

"As a leader, be prepared to listen – even when it’s uncomfortable for you to hear what is being said."

Leadership Advisory Inc: The Covid-19 pandemic is a difficult time, but it can also be a time of unprecedented creativity. What advice do you have for other leaders as they think about how diversity and inclusion efforts can add value to their business?

Caroline Stevens: As a global hotel operator, we have properties and team members from all over the world. So in a sense, we’ve been ahead of other industries in D&I. Given the magnitude of the pandemic, this has become a major advantage for us. We were able to involve every country and region representatives to collect intelligence and understand patterns to forecast what would or could happen.

From a customer’s point of view, this diversity has allowed us to come up with high standards of service for our quarantine guests. Through a diverse team, we are able to use equally diverse methods and shared best practices to come up with memorable and positive experiences for our 14 days’ in-house guests. Because of the new travel rules, we had to think of how we could turn a mandatory quarantine stay into a positive and satisfying guest experience which will benefit our brand reputation in the long run.

During these difficult times, many of our team members are also coping with work-life integration. Despite the challenges of suddenly working from home, we found that people are getting better at collaborating because they are becoming more sensitive to and respectful of other people’s personal commitments while at the same time working hard to support the business.

As the late Maya Angelou once wrote “people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Leadership Advisory Inc: In the context of your legacy, how would you like to be remembered as a Chief People Officer?

Caroline Stevens: I approach my role as a blend of architecture and conscience. Architecture in the sense of designing and creating a sustainable and positively-infused organisation. The conscience element comes into play when balancing financial expectations vis-à-vis humanity. COVID-19 has pushed all of us to make heart-breaking decisions to ensure the survival of our business and I have tried to keep it humane, be compassionate. This crisis is as overwhelming for leaders as it is for their teams. In times like this, you must communicate with authenticity and not resort to condescending corporate speak. Focus on listening, caring, and supporting. It is important to stay positive and hopeful when engaging teams without making promises you can’t keep.

As the late Maya Angelou once wrote “people will never forget how you made them feel.”

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In Conversation | Caroline Stevens, Chief People Officer of Minor Hotels

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