Roads to Resilience

With the huge volume of guests, each with their own individual expectations; “ in a hotel you’re working with the unexpected on a daily basis, people actually like to work in hotels because every day, every hour is different from the next ” (VP Operations, Central Europe and Germany). Therefore, flexible and skilled employees are essential (and the vast majority of these employees do not directly work for IHG). To create the right level of employees, IHG relies on hiring the right people, training, and on the ‘Winning Ways’ – a set of guiding principles that encapsulate a risk aware culture (see Exhibit IHG-1). Guidelines and training are essential but to manage risk effectively, “ you’ve got to have the right culture, otherwise you’re never going to embed anything. Nobody’s going to do the training, nobody’s going to put it on their personal agenda and talk about it, the networks aren’t going to happen, the network is where your culture lives ” (SVP Head of Global Risk Management). The ‘Winning Ways’ were developed from a series of workshops with staff members around the world and, because it summarised the ideas and words used by its people, these have been quickly accepted and internalised throughout IHG. Under the heading ‘Aim higher’, the guiding principles include ‘We put our hearts into learning new things’ and ‘We always look for ways to improve’. Thus learning is an integral part of the culture and IHG has, “ developed numerous risk management training products available to our hotels and directed at both leadership roles and front – line staff ” (SVP Head of Global Risk Management).

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Roads to Resilience: Building dynamic approaches to risk to achieve future success