InterContinental Hotels Group delivers business value through benefits strategy

As a large global hospitality organisation, the InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) ensures that it has a benefits strategy in place that supports the business goal of delivering value through preferred brands and talented people.

IHG has almost 4,900 hotels worldwide that are either franchised, owned or managed by the organisation, and its UK operations, with 1,800 employees, consists of its corporate offices, hotels and reservation office.

IHG’s strategy is to create value through its Winning model, which has five parts: preferred brands delivered through its people; build and leverage scale; a strong brand portfolio and loyalty programme; effective channel management; superior owner proposition.

IHG believes that a having a strong portfolio of preferred brands, which includes Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, and Hotel Indigo, is fundamental to its success. Rafael Gonzalez, director, compensation and benefits, Europe, says: “The key essence is our people. We are a service organisation, and it’s about the experience the guests have: the first impression they will get is through our people, so it is about making sure we can deliver an excellent service through our people, for our guests.”

The people element is clearly a key part of IHG’s business approach. Gonzalez explains that developing talent and ensuring it has the right people in the right roles is crucial. “We have a set of behaviours that define how we interact with our guests and colleagues, and call them our Winning Ways: do the right thing, show we care, aim higher, celebrate difference and work better together,” he explains. “I think they’re self-defining but we do lead through those five Winning Ways and make sure that we are working better as a team by going back to them, and saying ‘are we doing the right thing for our employees, for our owners and for our guests?’.”

IHG has also developed its BrandHearted culture to help employees consistently deliver value for each of its brands.

Role of benefits

Gonzalez believes that it is important to have a strong philosophy and employee value proposition that helps staff focus on total rewards on offer at IHG in comparison with other employers, even down to the subsidised coffee shop in its head office. “It’s having that overarching view, and when [we] talk about benefits [we] have to showcase it to employees to help them understand. For example, we have a gym onsite at no additional cost to employees, and we have classes that are run through the gym. It’s trying to have the right breadth of them so that you are relevant for your employee base.

“To fulfil our guests’ expectations we have to make sure our benefits are supporting our business to drive that forwards.”

Providing value

As a hotel group, it is unsurprising that one of the most relevant benefits IHG offers is its employee discount room rate. All employees are able to utilise the network of 4,900 hotels, and Gonzalez explains that it is an effective way for employees to gain a good understanding of how the business operates and how it provides value for guests.

“It is a very used benefit,” Gonzalez says. “Being in the hospitality industry, it is something that is linked back to us.”

IHG runs a global employee engagement survey twice a year, which includes questions about satisfaction with benefits. Its latest survey revealed that more than 70% of employees in Europe agree that the benefits are as good or better than those offered by competitors.

IHG piloted a bikes-for-work scheme this year, and will be opening it to corporate employees in January 2016, through Evans Cycles. “There has been a lot of interest in cycling to the office,” says Gonzalez.

Communication strategy

IHG uses a range of methods to communicate its benefits to staff. In November 2015 it held benefits fairs in one of its corporate offices to showcase the entire package to staff and remind them of what is available. “Sometimes what we’ve seen happen is, with long-standing employees, they look at their benefits when they join the company, and then put that aside, they make their decisions on what they will use, then two or three years down the line their reality has changed; for example, childcare vouchers weren’t useful back then, but now all of a sudden they are.”

IHG has to consider communications for its hotel population and its corporate population. “It has to be varied in the way we communicate to those [groups],” explains Gonzalez. “We have a corporate intranet, and we utilise that to store and share documents that relate to our benefits for our employees to then be able to refer back to at any point in time. We have a platform called Thinking Benefits delivered through Personal Group, that helps us to try to bind together in one place our core benefits together with our additional benefits into one platform, to help with communication. That’s supported by booklets delivered to employees on their join date.”

The employer also sends regular e-newsletters to corporate employees, and for hotel-based employees it uses posters and other messages.

In a competitive environment, IHG recognises its future challenges. “The markets are delivering better performance than we have seen in the past years, but we have to make sure that we continue to efficiently deliver our strategy, and, from a benefits perspective, maintain and support that for [talent] attraction and retention,” says Gonzalez.