Bill Kerr: As the hospitality industry bounces back from the pandemic, worker shortages continue to challenge both management and staff, particularly those in customer-facing and frontline roles. Businesses are turning to automation to extend their capabilities, but this also adds to the uncertain prospects of some job categories. How can employers make essential and demanding work more attractive to individuals looking for stability and career opportunities?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Laura Fuentes, Chief Human Resources Officer of Hilton. We’ll talk about the company’s people strategy from recruitment and skills training to automation and career development. We’ll delve into how the company is providing opportunities for underrepresented groups, addressing workers’ caregiving responsibilities, and offering targeted training and education benefits. We’ll also consider how these elements combine to expand Hilton’s talent pool while promoting upward mobility. Laura, welcome to the podcast.

Laura Fuentes: Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Kerr: Great to have you. Laura, you began your career in education and engineering. So tell us about the journey from structural engineering to HR.

Fuentes: Yeah. It’s perhaps a little bit of an unusual path. I studied engineering at UVA [University of Virginia], did my undergrad in civil engineering, and followed with a master’s in structural engineering at UT [University of Texas] Austin. And then started my career as an engineering associate at a British firm, Buro Happold, in New York City doing a lot of renovations and inspections with steel-toed boots and a hard hat. And I love the analytical problem-solving orientation, of course, of engineering, the teamwork, working between architects and engineers, but I also was really drawn to the people orientation, the people issues. Later on, as I joined McKinsey, I did a few projects in firm learning. At Capital One, I volunteered to lead the Hispanic Associate Network. I started the Women in Strategy group. And so, ultimately, when it came time to sort of find a new rotation out of the corporate strategy group, where I was working at Capital One, I sort of raised my hand for HR. I loved being able to solve people-oriented problems in a data-driven and strategic way, which my engineering orientation and then consulting and business school education sort of helped prepare me for. So my first gig in HR was at Capital One, and it was running the workforce analytics team. Eventually, 10 years ago, moved into Hilton. I’m originally from Spain and have grown up moving around a lot with my parents, who were diplomats. And so the international orientation of Hilton was super appealing. And spent a lot of my youth, actually, in and out of hotels. But once again, the engineering education and training has been so helpful to think about everything that we do at scale in a data-driven way, taking big problems, breaking them down to smaller ones, and pursuing sort of a strategic orientation to the work. So all in all, a bit of an unusual path, but I feel like it has really set me up to be successful in HR at a global hospitality firm.

Kerr: Well, we can very clearly hear the passion that you bring to it, and it’s also reflective of a number of HR leaders that we’ve spoken with that have come from operational sides and the different pathways that are bringing people into the people function today. We’re going to spend a lot of time talking about the programs you have in place at Hilton, but maybe we should begin by speaking a little bit about Hilton’s structure—the franchise nature of many of your operations—and then how does that shape the way you approach workforce at Hilton.

Fuentes: At Hilton, we are, of course, a global company. We have 8,300 properties around the world, and those, of course, are scattered around over 130 countries and territories. Some of the brands you probably know, and hopefully frequent: Hampton Inn, all the way to the luxury categories of Waldorf Astoria, Conrad, LXR, Signia, and, of course, our anchor brand, Hilton. So that translates into a very vast and global ecosystem that is supported by nearly 500,000 team members worldwide. Roughly 300,000 are going to be employed by our franchises, around 180,000 or so are in our managed estate and properties, and 10,000-plus in our corporate offices around the world. Now, from an HR and workforce point of view, of course, what we offer our different team members varies a little bit by region and depending on whether they’re corporate, managed or franchise team members. But we’re united by our purpose and by also our HR strategy, anchored on four key tenants of inclusion, wellness, growth, and purpose, which I can talk a little bit more about. But then, when we think of individual programs that support those pillars, of course they vary a little bit, right? So some of the partnerships that we may have in the U.S. are different from the ones that we have in China, but they’re all laddering up to providing an inclusive and healthy and growth-oriented, purpose-aligned experience for our team members. We, of course, don’t dictate the terms of certain benefits and wages for a franchise estate, but there are many benefits that transcend our franchise and managed properties. For example, in our recruitment efforts, we launched in 2023 for the first time ever an employer branding campaign, where we wanted to tell the world, “Hey, here’s how hospitality and Hilton specifically offers a world of opportunity and a great career orientation for folks.” We connected that to our consumer-facing work and made that a global campaign that really served both our managed and our franchise estates in this sort of halo effect of “Hilton is a great place to work.” Here’s why. Our learning tools, our Hilton University is open to our franchise estate, many of our recognition tools. One of our most beloved programs is our team member travel program. We call it “Go Hilton,” and it’s available to all of our team members. And this program allows us to offer amazing discounts for our properties worldwide and make them available to our team members. And it’s a win-win for our owners because these are property and rooms that would otherwise go unsold. Our team members not only travel the world but learn across different properties and category types. And we’ve recently connected it to our fund-raising efforts: the Hilton Global Foundation. And so those kinds of stories connect our entire ecosystem and bring the franchise team members [in]. Because ultimately for our guests, they walk into a Hilton property, and they’re not differentiating between franchise managed or owned properties. They want a Hilton experience that is connected by our team members.

Kerr: That’s great. We’re going to want to, I think, go into a variety of those programs as we talk through this podcast. Let’s kind of stay on the upward mobility aspect of that. And in the 2024 American Opportunity Index, Hilton ranked very high on that. And tell us a little bit about how that came about. What were the priorities or the culture that you put in place to really focus on upward mobility as one aspect of the employee experience?

Fuentes: Yeah. And look, we’re super proud of that recognition and really take it to heart, not only because, of course it allows us to tell the Hilton story, but also all of these benchmarks and the American Opportunity Index, as we compare to other companies and industries, allow us to really understand like, hey, where do we need to step up our game? What are our strengths that we need to play to? When we think about our growth and learning and leadership development efforts in particular, we always like to tell our team members and prospective candidates, “Look, come for a job, stay for a career.” Hilton—because of the vastness of our ecosystem, our global reach, the many categories and brands that we offer, our corporate offices around the world—we like to think of ourselves as the land of great opportunity, and so this recognition was super well aligned to that objective and aim. And the programs that we’ve put in place hopefully support that. So from a learning perspective, we have our for-all scalable platforms, Hilton University, LinkedIn Learning, where millions of learning hours are consumed each year by our team members, from our frontline team members to our executives. We also, throughout the year, launch business-aligned learning programs that really help us focus on specific brand standards or customer experiences that we want to deliver. So, for example, during the pandemic, we launched specific training that we called “CleanStay” to make sure that our team members—in particular, our housekeeping and front desk team members—knew how to create a safe environment that our guests would want to be a part of. And then, of course, we have our leadership development programs. And so these really help to support our team members at every stage of their career, from college graduates to executives in more sort of top-talent-orientation cohorts that help them really evolve those leadership skills. So those are just a few examples.

Kerr: And do you have to work with the franchise owners to activate this locally? Is it, again, to their discretion as to how to layer this into the business?

Fuentes: Yeah. So look, certain aspects are included in our brand standards. So those are the guidelines that we ask our franchise owners and operators to follow in order to deliver the experiences that we want for our guests, right? So things like our business-aligned trainings, those are sort of encouraged or driven through our brand standards. For others, we make available as needed, right? So we offer them as options for our franchises. So there are certain trainings around inclusive guest experiences or some of our LinkedIn learning that we’ll just make available to be used as needed. And so those are on demand, and team members across our franchise estates can opt in and customize based on what their needs might be at their specific points of their career journeys. And so it’s really fascinating to see, region by region, what’s interesting, what the highest downloads are, certain topics around data, becoming more fluent in AI, language skills. It’s really interesting to see what people pick and choose across our estate, but we try to balance that and toggle between, look, what are the courses that are required by our franchises, versus what we make available? And certain programs, of course, we reserve for our managed estates and corporate team members.

Kerr: You have a number of programs that specifically target recruiting, and then also developing underrepresented groups. Can you share a few of those that really stand out for you that you’re kind of especially proud of or have activated a group that’s been historically harder for the hospitality industry to reach?

Fuentes: So we have built, over the last few years, an Office of Pathways that we’re really proud of. And this really started historically with our commitment to military hires in the U.S. And we saw resounding success in setting specific ambitions in this space, reaching out to this demographic, finding really the common ground between what makes someone successful in hospitality and folks with a military background or caregiving or spouses of military. And we thought, could we replicate that model and that approach with other pathways? And so, for example, over the last few years, we have set up a global partnership with the Tent Partnership for Refugees in helping us really tap into that population around the world, and helping folks who may have been displaced by war or conflict find their footing and their professional sort of restarts in our industry. We’ve extended these pathways, then, to second-chance careers to survivors of trafficking, to youth opportunities, and trying to find in each instance a nonprofit that could help us really scale our efforts, the connection point to properties that may be doing this locally with great success, and therefore, we can help scale those efforts and ultimately trying to find the specific onboarding tools and success stories that we can amplify around the world. So that has been a great way for us to open up our aperture and really tell a different story to new candidates that perhaps hadn’t really thought of hospitality or hadn’t found their way to us. And in the last year, it’s actually been really amazing to see how much our individual properties have done with this work around the world. So I was just in Poland a few months ago visiting our Warsaw Hilton, and the general manager there and the team members have a partnership with a local university that is really helping to retrain senior citizens and help them find their way back into the workforce. And so they held a training day with a couple of dozen individuals and were able to hire a few. And it’s just incredible to me to see those opportunities flourishing at candidate pools that perhaps we weren’t tapping into as deliberately and effectively in the past. So collectively this year, we’ve hired 15,000 people through these pathways around the world so far, and just so inspired every time I travel and seeing how we bring this to life around our regions.

Kerr: That’s exciting. And a persistent theme on this podcast has been the challenges of an aging population and workforce dynamics and changes, so identifying also a program that is working to have people reenter the workforce that have been retired is spot on. I want to go back to the pandemic. And you mentioned a little bit earlier some of the training programs you put into place around that. But the hospitality industry was severely hit by the pandemic. And tell us a little bit about how you navigated through that. And then where are you today in terms of return to office programs? And how does that play out?

Fuentes: I remember February 2020, we had actually just been named the No. 1 Best Place to Work in the U.S., and it was one of the last trips I took to that conference in San Francisco that Great Place To Work was putting on. And then overnight, as we all witnessed, travel sort of stopping, coming to a standstill, and for us for the first time, in really a hotel’s history, having to suspend operations at our properties, which if you think of a hotel, from the moment it’s opened, it never closes, right? Over holidays, New Years, all night. And so suddenly, we had to keep, of course, our guests safe, but then very quickly pivoting to keeping our team members safe. Now, some of our properties were still, of course, operating, and we made many of our rooms available to first responders, to doctors, to the medical community. And so our team members had to show up and help support those guests. So our first priority was to keep them safe, of course, to keep them engaged, and we put in place a number of communication channels to do that. And then, of course, to keep them healthy and well and taking care of them. And we all know that what started really as a physical health crisis, not only in our industry, but evolved around the world into a mental wellness crisis, a caregiving crisis. So we launched a Care for All platform. We organized our resources there around Care For All, Care For Self, Care for Elderly, Care For Children—we even had a Care For Pets section—and partnered with a few organizations that would really help us alleviate some of this burden that our team members were feeling. And so on the mental wellness side, we partnered with some great EAP [employee assistance program] resources to help engage, in a one-on-one way, with the counseling that our team members needed. I, myself, actually the first time that I was diagnosed with Covid in those early days of lockup before we had vaccines, I remember calling the EAP center and just getting some help and mental wellness resources and advice on how to navigate a 10-day lock-in when you’re doing that in a high-pressured work environment as well. We amplified our Care For All platform with organizations like Thrive Global, who we had been partnering for many years with. And they had some great resources and mental wellness apps that could reach all of our team members. We partnered with Wellthy as a caregiving concierge in the U.S., U.K., and Ireland. I know you all have profiled them before, and they’ve been an extraordinary partner for our team members, really alleviating that research burden, that organizational burden for them to begin caregiving journeys at various stages of need. And so we felt that, in those dark times, and even as we were having to make some really difficult decisions around our workforce, that we were also showing up in ways that were meaningful, that helped them through the crisis. As you asked about, obviously, the return-to-office situation, we also wanted to, in those early-ish days, as it became safe to do so at our corporate offices, to stand in solidarity with our frontline team members. And I personally find a lot of the conversation around flexibility and return to office, of course, tends to center on white-collar office workers, knowledge workers. And we never wanted to forget our frontline team members, who were putting their lives at risk to serve our guests. We did not have a mandate to return to office, but we wanted to make our offices places of collaboration, magnets for our team members, and we sort of put out the expectation that teams return. We recognize, of course, we’re a travel organization, and so we encourage our team members to travel. They’re on the road a lot, so our corporate office participation reflects that. But today, I sit in our corporate office. We’re actually driving a big renovation of our building. We have great attendance across our offices, and so trying to do that in a flexible but business-aligned way. And of course, speaking of flexibility, we also wanted to make sure that our hotel team members, even though it’s a little bit harder to figure out remote work for them, but that we were delivering on flexibility for them. And so that meant posting schedules with at least a two-week notice across our hotels. That meant building what we call our “Heart of House” environment, which is where our team members go to change into their wardrobes, to recharge, our team-member restaurants that offer nutritious meals. We wanted to make sure that that environment was welcoming, warm, a place that often when I travel, people say, this is our home away from home.

Kerr: Many of the caregiving programs that you described, the Care for All and Wellthy, they’re obviously persisting until today. Do you find that, post-pandemic, four years out, and as we go beyond here, that attending to caregiving needs is as important? Is it growing importance? How does it remain a part of what your team members are looking for?

Fuentes: I think it’s maintaining and growing in importance. The usage cases increase, and so, therefore, we drive more amplification of both awareness, trial, and repeat usage, right? So folks will tell us of the great stories of not only caregiving during difficult moments, but also just natural transitions of helping kids go through college applications, helping aging parents with their health needs and doing research around that. Making sure that as we think of self-care and the conversation around that evolves, that leaders are sharing examples of vulnerability. And so, therefore, that cascades and helps our team members tap into the resources. We continue to evolve and offer up new types of support. So one program that we just rolled out over the course of 2024 is our Crisis Concierge. This is one where I hope very few of our team members will ever have to use, but that it’s there when needed. In 2023, I was traveling with our CEO in Portugal and Spain and France, and one of our team members in Portugal tragically lost his son. And he said, “Hilton really supported me in many ways, but there were some things where we fell short. And let me tell you what would’ve helped me more or better so that I can be a part of helping others in the future.” From that conversation, he and I stayed in touch, he connected with our broader benefits team, and we designed this Crisis Concierge that would be available to all team members when they are facing perhaps trauma that is paralyzing in its nature and doesn’t allow you to fully access your benefits. And this concierge now has helped a couple of dozen team members already in the U.S. alone. So to your question, we keep evolving, listening, offering resources that we think are going to make a difference and matter to our team members at every step of their journey with us.

Kerr: Just segueing or continuing on that theme, employee feedback systems are becoming ever more important. How do we hear the worker voice servicing up these ideas? And you gave a very poignant example there. What are other ways that Hilton is seeking, among a very, very large team, trying to understand how people are thinking about opportunities and where employee sentiment is?

Fuentes: There’s a spectrum from the one-on-one conversations that our leaders are encouraged to have. The town halls that they conduct across their teams always have a component of, let’s have an open discussion. What’s your feedback? How do we collect it? But, of course, at our scale, we need to leverage mechanisms that help us drive data-informed feedback collection. And so we rely heavily on both our global team member survey, which is now in its 10th-plus year, and from external benchmarks. So we partner with organizations, like the Great Place To Work Institute, to collect feedback across the world and compare it externally to other organizations who, of course, we compete with for talent. We look at every aspect of the team member experience from recruitment, benefits, their management experience, their experience with their leaders, how we listen to their feedback, what they’d like us to do differently moving forward. Over the years, it is their feedback that has helped shape programs like our Team Member travel program, which I spoke about. So those are the various mechanisms that we try to collect at scale. We generate, from this survey, hundreds of thousands of comments that we then leverage text analytics to really help us understand the patterns. What is working well? What do we need to lean in more heavily in? And so that’s sort of the primary mechanism. Our CEO travels the world over multiple times a year and really spends time with our team members, with our owners in our ecosystem, learning about what can we do better, what’s working really well. We just concluded our global general manager conferences around the world, and those are heavily oriented toward in-person connections so that we can also learn in-person, live, in real life from our team members and leaders. So we balance some of those mechanisms but are sort of in that always-on listening mode and trying to collect the scalable feedback in a data-driven way.

Kerr: Yeah, I’d love to hold on to something you described in that last segment of the competitive nature of this. And we can look at many of these programs and think they’re very good, they’re very important. Fair chance practices, employing refugees, those are all very admirable, as is helping people with their caregiving responsibilities. But you actually had a second part to that, which is, in your business, you win or lose based upon the talent that you bring into it. So can you reflect a little bit of how that conversation goes with your leadership team around you?

Fuentes: We tell our owners and our leaders around the world, when our team members feel that they’re welcomed, they’re listened to, they are invested in, they tend to give us their discretionary effort, they help us innovate, they stay with us longer, they drive down turnover costs. And so all that is good for business. And, in fact, as we measure our results in this space, we do so, like other parts of our business, with a balanced scorecard approach. So we’ll look at things like attitudinal data. So this is the feedback that we get from our surveys. What is our team members’ experience? And what is their feedback on that? But we also look at behavioral data. Are they staying with us? Are they turning over at higher rates in certain parts of the business or in certain roles? Are they getting promoted? Are they growing from within? And those stats are telling us, actually, that our turnover rates are about 50 percent of industry averages, which we’re really proud of. They’re five points lower than they were at the peak of Covid. So we’re back to record low turnover rates, which is great for business and saves us millions across our ecosystem. Our growth rates are really strong as well. So we see over 50 percent of our general managers and leadership positions being filled internally, which is great because we always want to maintain that balance of external leadership perspectives and internal growth. And our engagement scores as we closed, our team member feedback survey, are at an all-time high. So all of these metrics help us translate to, look, are we driving the right outcomes for our workforce? And then, in turn, are they driving the right outcomes for our guests in terms of satisfaction scores, loyalty, et cetera. And our business metrics are quite high and quite strong, and I think that is one of the contributions that our workforce drives to our business success. And, of course, we are also, as you say, always competing for the best talent across, not only hospitality but other industries. So these points of recognition with the American Opportunity Index, our Great Place to Work rankings, we were named No. 1 World’s Best Workplace in 2023, No. 2 just named a couple of weeks ago in 2024, those global points of recognition really help with our recruitment efforts, our recognition with new generations entering the workforce, and really help drive that performance that we’re seeking from our workforce.

Kerr: Laura, we began this by describing your background and engineering and technology and your work with heavy data-analytic firms like Capital One. So I want you to help us think about where is Hilton arcing toward in terms of technology in the hotel properties, automation, some robots that may be moving around. And how does that interact with the HR side of the business?

Fuentes: We always want to think of these opportunities in technology as enhancing our service. We’re not seeking to replace that human touch, but where we can enhance it, customize it, augment or offer new experiences that our guests may not have otherwise been privy to, then that is all great for business, and great for our team members, frankly, when they can be alleviated from some of the more repetitive, lower-value interactions to focus on the magic that we want to bring to our experiences. We’re really looking at thoughtfully inserting opportunities for automation, for AI, as we’ve done all along, with a more data-enhanced approach as well. From a team member perspective, on the recruitment side, we have, of course, looked at opportunities, given the massive volume of candidate applications that we have, to help triage this in a more effective and efficient way, and AI is helping us in that enormously—from our LinkedIn applications all the way to our CRM applications and helping us think of the job descriptions and how to automate that, how to find the best fit with candidates. And that’s helping our recruiters then spend more and better time driving a candidate experience that is customized, personalized with that human touch. When I think of the on-property experience—and I’ll give you an example of experiencing this just in China—Shenzhen—last week when I was visiting some of our properties and saw a lineup of robots. And so the interface here is amazing, right? Our guests can, through the tap of a couple of clicks, request a towel, request a bottled water, request their sort of Door Dash delivery equivalent, and these robots can be fed whatever needs to be brought up to the room and independently and autonomously travel the corridor, the elevator, navigate directly to the room. And they’re being actually enhanced with vacuum and floor-cleaning capabilities. So as they’re doing this, they’re also multitasking and cleaning our halls. So these kinds of examples are actually additive to the guest experience, make our team members’ lives easier, because they’re not taking them away from the floor, the front desk, the restaurants, and I think have a ton of untapped potential for us. If I think of the HR lifecycle—from recruiting to learning, to coaching, to leadership development—so many opportunities, of course, to drive augmented reality trainings where we can have these intuitive guest experiences that our team members can rehearse on de-escalations, how to solve problems live in the moment. And so practicing in this augmented-reality space is an environment that we’ve actually been driving for years. On the coaching side, we’re also partnering with BetterUp, leveraging virtual coaches, and that allows us really to, not necessarily replace our HR team members, but offer these programs to a greater array of team members and help us democratize certain benefits and programs that perhaps in the past were reserved for a more exclusive executive senior population in the case of coaching. So we look at it as an efficiency play in some cases, but also as a way to augment our offering both to our guests and our team members. On property, again, one of the big AI plays that we’re driving is around messaging with our guests and being able to customize, solve issues as they arise more quickly, and driving these tools with them in a virtual way as well.

Kerr: You earlier mentioned how with some of the programs designed to have a greater aperture for the employee inbound, a lot of it was about showcasing to the franchise owners, “This is possible. Look at this opportunity that’s been realized.” Is the same going to be true in this technology space as well, that you want to show people what the technology can do, but in the end, it’s going to be up to the franchise owner, the rate at which they’re going to implement various technology solutions?

Fuentes: Some of these will become embedded into our brand standards. Some of them will become optional resources for them to embrace. And frankly, in many cases, we’re also learning from our franchise operators on some of the best practices that they’re leveraging. Typically, we’ll start with pilots to prove out the business case, embedding them as we drive success into our brand standards and continuously learning through that feedback loop from them. So I expect that to be similar across all the applications that we’re testing out in our workforce space, for sure. And as we drive certain guest innovations, we try to be really balanced and thoughtful about that as well.

Kerr: Hilton has properties that are not only global, but in every type of political jurisdiction in very liberal areas, very conservative areas. And as we think about issues related to diversity and inclusion, how do you navigate that as such a broad-based firm?

Fuentes: Yeah, look, we’ve navigated this for over a century, and as we’ve grown globally, in a way that hopefully is true to our purpose and values. When we welcome team members of different backgrounds into our ecosystem, onto our teams, we’re better able to serve our increasingly diverse guest population. And our team members, when we make the effort to welcome them and recruit them from many different pathways, as I spoke about, will ultimately bring better perspectives to the guest experience, will help us innovate differently. When they feel that they’re respected and listened to, that’s how, in turn, they make our guests feel. So that work is going to remain, and we try to make sure that we’re, of course, balancing that with regulatory constraints and making sure that we are very plugged into any of the evolving labor environments, and that we’re really thoughtful about creating safe environments for our team members. But we continuously ladder back to what’s good for our business, what’s good for our guests. And that is always going to be having team members of many different backgrounds serve them in ways that feel inclusive, respectful, and aligned to our business needs.

Kerr: We’re coming to the end here. If you think about the years ahead, the next three to five years, what are some of the big trends or things that are on your horizon to navigate through?

Fuentes: Obviously, we’re going to stay super focused on AI, tech, and how we can drive better guest experience, better team member experience, drive efficiencies through that work. I’m personally really interested in continuing to have the conversations around generations in the workforce, and I have great hope for generations as they enter the workforce. I think for all the energy that this generates and some of the memes and controversies that it generates, I’m super hopeful. And I think new generations bring energy, innovation, new insights, new perspectives that I’m keen to tap into and blend with the existing generations. And look, we’re always going to be thinking about how to develop the next generation of leaders and leadership. So that’s going to be a big focus for us and helping to scale that around the world. But really excited about what that will bring to our workforce and the ideas that it’ll bring both for our frontline and corporate office team members.

Kerr: Laura Fuentes is the Chief Human Resources Officer of Hilton. Laura, thanks so much for joining us today.

Fuentes: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.