InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has more than 3,600 hotels with more than a half-million guest rooms in almost 100 countries and territories. Each year some 120 million people stay at InterContinental Hotels Group brands, including Crown Plaza Hotels
by Kellye Whitney
December 28, 2005
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has more than 3,600 hotels with more than a half-million guest rooms in almost 100 countries and territories. Each year some 120 million people stay at InterContinental Hotels Group brands, including Crown Plaza Hotels & Resorts, Holiday Inn Hotels & Resorts and Staybridge Suites. Lynne Zappone, vice president of training and development at the InterContinental Hotels Group, the Americas, said her work is all about the brand, and confessed that it takes more than one department to run a hotel, even when that department is as important as learning.
Zappone began her career as a middle-school teacher. She stepped into the enterprise learning and development field as a hotel training manager and became a director with responsibilities for everything from new employee orientation to working with the leadership team. After a five-year interlude away from the hotel industry as the head of organization and management development for a financial services company, Zappone took responsibility for InterContinental Hotels Group’s Crown Plaza brand. Eight years later, she has responsibility for more than 22,000 corporate employees, 2,500 franchise hotels and multiple brands.
“There are three different types of hotel situations you can have. Well, there are actually more than three, since there are slight nuances,” Zappone explained. “A hotel is an asset, so you can own the building and manage it, you can just manage it and someone else owns it, or you can not own it nor manage it. That’s a franchise situation. We have franchise hotels, we have hotels that we own and manage, and we have hotels that we just manage. When we manage a hotel, those employees are our employees, so when I offer training for IHG employees, it would include corporate, reservation center and managed hotels.”
Providing support to franchise hotels is one of Zappone’s greatest challenges, especially the task of gathering and distributing needed resources all over the United States, Mexico, Canada and Latin America. Options such as distance learning are not always effective because different hotels have different IT infrastructures, bandwidth and other challenges that inhibit information sharing. “Even if you wanted to hand off something to them, do they have someone on site who’s going to be able to implement an on-site program?” Zappone asked. “From the corporate and managed hotel side, we’re trying to develop employees—it’s really working with leadership and helping them develop skills to coach and give feedback—to take on the role of talent manager, whether it’s their individual managed hotel or within their department here at corporate.”
Franchise hotels have an agreement with InterContinental Hotels Group that allows them access to a central fund for advertising, as well as use of the company’s central reservation system, but in exchange for use of these amenities, they must adhere to certain training standards. “If you’re going to run our hotel, you need to really keep up to speed on what’s going on with our systems, our processes and new stuff, even leadership,” Zappone said. “If you were going to be an Express hotel or a Holiday Inn hotel, you must go to initial training certification. The GM (general manager) must go to the GM school, and the front-office manager must go to the front-office operations training program. The director of sales must go to director-of-sales training. There are requirements, and they have annual recertification,” Zappone said.
InterContinental Hotels Group has tested alternative delivery methods to aid learning at franchise hotels. It found success in a partnership with Centra and began development on an e-learning platform that will fulfill IHG employees’ desire for more individualized learning and development opportunities, and address the needs of hotels with specific problems. “We are always working with our hotels on quality issues,” Zappone said. “We’ve been using Centra in two ways. One, there is some basic learning that hotels need to know about how to use our quality tools, how to use reporting as an analytical tool to help figure out why service or quality scores may be going down. We used Centra to design a basic program for them, the Overall Satisfaction Index. We’ve also used it when hotels are really in trouble and they’re not sure how to fix their problems. We invite those hotels that are struggling to have interaction with other hotels. There will be a leader on the event who is an expert in this area and can share some best practices on how they can turn some things around. It becomes an opportunity for them to get some assistance and some advice without having to wait for someone to go there and visit them.
“We really listen to our end-user clients in that large, expanded community,” Zappone said. “What are they looking for? What do they need to figure out ways to get around our infrastructure or technology challenges? They also want greater variety, and they want things that are a little bit more individualized for them. We’re working with some of our cross-functional departments that visit the hotels often to find out what’s really happening out there. What do we need to add to our curriculum? What is a real need in a majority of hotels?”
Centra also has aided InterContinental Hotels Group’s senior leadership development program, specifically helping candidates grasp orientation and the pre-work required. “We go over each item: when it’s due, why it’s important, how it will be used during the program. As soon as we started doing that, we had practically zero questions from people about what they had to get done,” Zappone said. “We’ve also started using it at post-events where we’ve got people going through a front-office operations training program. The instructors follow up with them about eight weeks later to have a chat session about what’s working and what’s not working: What of what you learned in the program are you applying in your hotel? How has that impacted service or productivity?”
John Courtney, learning technologies manager at InterContinental Hotels Group, used Centra to quickly gather feedback from client groups about the effectiveness of the hotels’ services and support. “Most of our metrics are associated with speed and trying to get things out to our extremely geographically dispersed operations. Speed is our number-one issue because of the size of the organization, and that’s one of the reasons we entered into a collaboration tool first rather than taking a more traditional route through course authoring, learning management systems and other technologies,” Courtney explained. “Over the last couple of years, we’ve been able to utilize Centra as essentially a speed platform to target specific properties, individuals or otherwise, that we can get the message to fairly quickly. The first year that we did this, we had one major event that helped sell the business on us. Our Express brand was rolling out a new bath initiative. They were changing out essentially a lot of the amenities, creating a curved shower bar, new towels—a whole new look and feel for the bath. The idea was we would be able to expand the number of reservations we received based on having a better bath than anybody else in that market segment. IHG needed to get that message out fairly quickly because they wanted to hit in the marketplace and install to all of our Express properties starting in September and be finished by February of the next year. It was a very quick turnaround of retro-fitting about 1,400 hotels at the time.”
In the past, Courtney said in order to conduct a learning event of this scale, InterContinental started a road show and would spend up to 13 weeks on the road getting the hotel owners up to speed on the proposed changes to their properties, explaining the expense for the initiative, when they could expect installation and the expected impact on their revenues. This time, the company used Web conferencing. “We used 100 hotels at a time, and sent e-mails directly to their owner and their GM,” Courtney said. “In the past they might get 200 owners or GMs to show up at their road shows. We had close to 800 people show up for the Centra event. For the brand, it was a significant impact. They’d never seen that kind of involvement on the part of the owners in an initiative that had rolled out to their hotels.”
Zappone said that learning and development at InterContinental Hotels Group has a close relationship with human resources. The two departments work together on talent development, succession planning, mentoring, 360-degree feedbacks and in assessment centers where the organization screens for high-potentials, creating a link between learning and development offerings and performance. “We’re trying very hard not to just throw things out there,” she said. “I need to have people who have hotel operations backgrounds and facilitation skills, so they can teach programs to hotel operators and there’s a level of respect and understanding there. I’ve got to have people who have good instructional design and performance consulting skills to work with our brand teams and our support functions to help them figure out what issues impact our hotel employees. What solutions do we need to develop to reduce those gaps? I need people who can run assessment centers and give performance feedback and coaching and 360 feedback. I sort of have a mini-OD group and a performance consulting group, and then I have a bunch of trainers who are out there training constantly, giving feedback and coaching people in the classroom.”
Over the next 12 to 18 months, Zappone said that InterContinental Hotels Group will begin work on a customized core curriculum for all of its corporate and managed employees and work with managers to help them identify specific employee needs, uncover strengths to leverage and weaknesses to develop, and create targeted development plans for each role. Senior employees and high-potentials will enjoy the benefits of action learning and stretch assignments that offer development opportunities for exposure and experience. “We want to help people understand that development is not just going to a class,” Zappone said. “It’s not just reading a book. It’s about getting on a certain project and determining what to work on while on that project or getting exposure to a different work team where there is an area that you need to learn more about. In our managed hotels, we will continue to develop our pipeline of talent, run assessment centers, do a lot of coaching and what I like to call hand-holding, and follow up on those high-potentials who have the potential to move up within a hotel to become an executive committee member or a general manager of a hotel. It is important to keep an eye on your talent, know what they need and provide them with development experiences.”
—Kellye Whitney, kellyew@clomedia.com
Name: Lynne Zappone
Title: Vice President,
Talent Development & Learning
Company: InterContinental Hotels Group
Successes:
- Developed and implemented customized assessment centers for high-potential managers and executives.
- Developed and led the regional implementation of a global senior leadership development program.
- Launched an expanded curriculum for franchised hotel operators.
- Launched and integrated Web-based collaboration across a global organization.
- Partnered with brand leaders to create customized selection and development tools for a multi-branded organization.
Learning Philosophy: “The mission of the Talent Development & Learning team is to provide tools and resources, which improve hotel and individual performance. IHG is committed to helping our people succeed in their current roles while preparing them for future opportunities. When associates have the tools and skills to do their job and feel confident about what they are doing, we believe they provide a superior service experience and level of support to their guests and each other.”