Accor and Unite

The hotel industry is experiencing increasing levels of employee turnover and decreasing retention, particularly at front line level where roles are relatively unskilled. Many new employees are immigrants who are unable to get employment in their chosen professions who have no hospitality industry skills, but see these jobs as the pathway to another job out of the industry. Sometimes they remain in hospitality.

The PRC has been working with a joint working party made up of representatives from two hotels within the ACCOR hotel group and Unite! Union looking at ways to improve communication and staff engagement in order to improve staff retention rates.

The indications are that our invention has been positive – staff turnover rates have reduced from around 72% in the year to December 2007 to 47% for the year ending December 2008 in the hotels in the project.

Comments

“The project has been useful and has given us insight into where we should improve from our employees’ point of view, it's something we wouldn’t have seen. The Collective Agreement negotiations were not volatile, pretty good actually. There’s no doubt the building of a higher level of trust between managers, front line employees, Unite and Accor by the PRC has been a significant contributor to this. Retention has improved dramatically and the project has played a significant part in that.” NZ & Pacific Regional Human Resources Director.

“The project has created the space to have honest dialogue. It's allowed us to get under the surface "claims" and has allowed us (employer and union) to say we have a problem when talking about pay rates, certainty of hours etc. It's led to significant breakthroughs because we've been able to have conversations that we could never have with other employers or without the background of the partnership. We’re now talking about applying the partnership to training for staff in lifestyle and leadership skills, both sides can see the benefit.” Union Secretary