Now that the world is getting vaccinated and spaces opening up, what does the hospitality landscape look like from an HR perspective?

The vaccination drive has definitely acted as a morale booster. As more and more people get vaccinated and become more confident, travel will increase which is good news for hotels as it will lead to increase in occupancy and revenues will increase. However, Covid appropriate behaviour protocol and social distancing measures along with a strong focus on Hygiene and sanitation is here to stay for the long run.

How did you keep the staff motivated during this difficult time?

Mental health of team members is most critical during this difficult time. Our leadership team believes in keeping the lines of communication open at all times  and we act as a mentor to our team, motivating them to look at the bigger picture and how we will come out stronger and wiser from this crisis. The idea is to focus on the positives and control the controllable points instead of worrying about things and situation which are not under our control.

What lessons do you feel you have learned from this period?

The most important lesson is that ‘Health is Wealth’. We need to focus on both our physical and mental health. In such stressful times, it is easy to get depressed. Therefore speaking to our loved ones or a close friend/colleague acts as a tonic. Leading a healthy life style with exercise, eating healthy food and focusing on building a strong immunity is most essential. The second and foremost thing is that in this ever changing world, we need to constantly reinvent ourselves and push the bar in terms of our learning and update our knowledge constantly as what is relevant yesterday may not be relevant tomorrow.

Is hiring coming back soon?

Hiring is coming back but it will be slow and steady. Pre covid level hiring is not expected for at least an year and half. Most hotel companies will adopt a wait and watch approach to hiring and take a decision based on increase in travel and demand. International travel to India is still very restricted. Once the corporate travel increases, business hotels will start hiring based on requirement, whereas in the case of resort and leisure destinations, we are seeing a lot of revenge travel happening and the recovery will be faster which means hiring will start sooner as compared to city business hotels.

Did you experiment with any new L&D ideas/tech?

Our Hilton Online University has world class and state of the art online programs which focuses on both technical as well as soft skill knowledge. Our team members have access to lot of learnings such as Linkedin Learnings, Harvard Mentor, TED Videos etc. In addition,  the leadership team also organised a lot of online webinars for the management team focusing on mental health, career development, departmental leadership training programs etc. At Hilton, we lay a lot of emphasis on the holistic and all round learning and development of our team members.

As some wise man once said, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. Crisis situations often bring out the best in our leaders as it demands us to innovate through out of box thinking in order to be relevant.

It is important that most of us update our knowledge and have a secondary skill to fall back upon in these difficult times and multi-tasking is the key. We encourage our team members to do cross training in different department and develop an attitude towards lifelong learning . Team members who are flexible and are open to new avenues of learning and are ready to innovate and take on new challenges are the ones who will flourish in times to come. In a world dominated by technology and with the dominant presence of Artificial intelligence , even front line staff working in culinary, housekeeping, stewarding are encouraged to learn and develop their computer skills and be more tech savvy.