The hospitality industry was turned upside down in 2020, and like all hotel chains, Maryland-based Choice Hotels had a lot to rethink. There was no script for Choice to follow to manage the new scenarios the pandemic presented to the industry, and agility and flexibility were key factors to embrace if the hotel wanted to make it past this unprecedented event. To accomplish this, the learning leaders at Choice University, the organization’s learning arm, needed to reevaluate their strategy and curriculum to better highlight agility and other key skills that the hospitality industry needed in its workforce to stay competitive.
As a result of what they’ve been able to accomplish despite the challenges of 2020-2021, Choice Hotels International placed seventh in this year’sLearningElite program.
ChoiceU has been around for almost 20 years and supports the learning needs of 7,100 franchises and 65,000 external staff worldwide. While supporting the needs of these parties, the learning organization must also support Choice’s overall business strategy. It’s no easy feat, but the learning organization has found a strategy that works for everyone.
“It is our passion: empathy for our learners and how we seek to understand their needs and keep that at the forefront for all training projects,” says Jeneane Baker, dean of ChoiceU. “We know our learners, we care about them, and we are intensely focused on helping them grow as individuals and helping their hotels improve performance.”
Solutions
ChoiceU’s learning analytics manager led the charge in administering surveys and anticipating trends in learners. In 2020, the major insights he highlighted were that learners especially liked both video content and on-the-job training resources. With this information, the ChoiceU team was able to focus much of their bandwidth on improving these two areas.
Leaders have the greatest impact on employee engagement and performance, so ChoiceU centered much of this strategy on people in more senior roles.
New job-training resources helped managers and leaders develop the skills needed to build a strong culture and an engaged workforce. Since employees enjoyed learning on the job, training for leadership would teach them how to administer on-the-job training at their own properties. Leaders would also have options on how to conduct this based on the property’s culture and workforce.
“Many leaders are operationally strong but may not know how to onboard new employees or develop and grow them over time,” Baker says. “We believe by equipping leaders with on-the-job resources to use with their staff, it can help them deliver a better employee experience.”
Based on these insights, another major piece of this learning solution was creating more video content with quicker turnaround times — making it easier for the organization to stay flexible amid the tumultuous pandemic. They intentionally produced videos with low- to mid-level production quality so they could be highly responsive to business needs. Meanwhile, the content itself is high-quality and goes through a review process to ensure it is relevant content created for maximum business impact.
The data analytics manager also discovered that even though much of the training available to leaders and employees focused on operational needs, what many people felt was lacking was content on customer service and handling difficult situations. With this insight, ChoiceU developed more service-focused content.
Finally, ChoiceU built a Disaster Relief Education site within its platform so franchises could have quick, one-stop access to pandemic-related resources. This site gave the ChoiceU team the flexibility to revise or add fresh content multiple times a day, providing franchise owners with the opportunity to stay up-to-date.
Results
At the height of the pandemic, ChoiceU was able to successfully focus on delivery speed and the volume of learning content — specifically curated for the needs of learners across the business at different franchises. The learning organization was able to decrease video development cycle time by 25 percent, drive record-breaking learner engagement and see cost savings of $237,000 associated with upskilling and creating resources more quickly.
Meanwhile, Choice Hotels has learned a lot from this experience to inform its learning and development strategy moving forward. It plans on partnering even more closely with hotel leaders, staff members and franchisee-facing teams in the organization to further understand their needs and develop learning strategies that are proactive toward those goals, Baker says. She adds that ChoiceU understands that recovery will not look the same for each of the thousands of hotels in the system. The right learning strategy won’t be one-size-fits-all.
“This will require a more à la carte approach with several varied operational solutions in the learning content, all while staying true to our philosophy of right content, right time, for the right people and keeping it engaging and digestible,” she says.
Andie Burjek is a writer based in Chicago. She is a regular contributor to Chief Learning Officer and Talent Management. To comment, email editor@clomedia.com.
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July 28, 2021 at 02:40AM
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ChoiceU supports thousands of hotel franchises with an agile learning strategy - Chief Learning Officer
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