Company Profile

Red Carnation Hotels

Evidence of a positive working environment

Each hotel has a monthly tea party where the General Manager talks to the staff about all the fabulous events happening in their hotel for the coming month! Training Certificates, Catch a Stars and Long Service Awards are given out. People are encouraged to share examples of great service they have given and are rewarded for excellent ideas. Our quarterly worldwide newsletter (still homemade but a well-read document!) gives news on the hotels, staff and personal lives of some of our people - weddings, births, etc. A training event happens every single day in the UK and are well attended. Many training courses are linked to qualifications and this encourages people to attend and achieve whatever the course work criteria is. We see this as a win/win and very much help people to make a success of whatever it is they are working on. Presentation days take place after many of the managment sessions where employees are encouraged to talk about what they learnt and what their aspirations are and these are attended by our owner, Managing Director, Executive Team and hotel management team. People's profiles reach an all time high and they are entered onto the database of STARs!

Evidence of continued professional development

In the hotel industry this takes many forms! For example people coming over from Eastern Europe (or anywhere that is a non-English speaking country) had the opportunity to our English classes and we have committed to continue to run these even though the government funding is drying up! So for some, getting their English to a more fluent level will help their professional development and we have many sucess stories of people who have joined us with a little English and are now in positions of responsiblity because they have worked hard and improved. One day I hope we see a General Manager who joined us with not too much English language and worked his or her way up to the top ... and beyond! All our Accounts team have sat their BAHA professional development (ie, the Accounts qualification in the hotel industry); many food and beverage employees have or are gaining their Wine and Spirit Diploma; in Human Resources we have 2 people who are learning their CIPD. On top of this, we 48 employees who are studying an NVQ at present. Many of our training courses are linked to qualifications with the Institute of Leadership and Management.

Evidence of equal opportunities and work-life balance

In our industry work life balance is hard to achieve and we have to look carefully at requests for flexible working, etc. First of all though, unlike many hotels we try very hard to ensure that people stick to their hours of work. In HR we monitor this vigilently. We organise a chiropodist to pay each hotel a visit on a regular basis and give this service free to anyone who works on their feet all day! We are truly an equal opportunities employer and work hard to ensure that all managers understand what that really means. We hold regular training sessions on this topic and make it a mandatory course for all supervisors level and above. We have a reputation for home growing our own managers and indeed at management in all our hotels and on our Executive team, we can proudly say that we are all homegrown. So if you have the attitude, skills and knowledge, you will progress with RCH! We now have many people working flexi time to allow for their home and family commitments. Indeed we recently gave two members of staff flexible working so that they could study on certain days of the week!

Evidence of measures taken to assess effectiveness

Our Employee Opinion Survey (we are doing another one this year) showed an increase in Job satisfaction, Career progression opportunities and that people felt they were being better managed. We also measure our efforts through our guest comments which continue to thrive and are reflected in the awards we have won this year eg. The TripAdvisor Award 2007 and the AA Best Small Hotel Group Award 2007/08. Our labour turnover statistic is below the industry average and way less than our competitors at 30% year to date, which shows that do not lose people "unnecessarily" or, by and large, for the wrong reasons. We conduct Exit interviews for all those that do leave us and the highest proportion of leavers are either returning to their country of origin or have been given a fantastic opportunity with another hotel or industry that we are not able to offer them. When this is the case, we let people go with good grace and hope that one day they join us again. Since September 11th we invested a lot of money in training our Sales Managers and have reaped the rewards of them incresing our market segmentation (confirmed through Deloittes) to over 10%..

Profile provided by Red Carnation Hotels

Back to Entrant Profiles list