Malmaison & Hotel du Vin
Boutique hotel chain Malmaison & Hotel du Vin is one of Europe’s leading hotel brands, gaining a reputation for being at the cutting edge of hospitality. The group advocates a belief in delivering hospitality in a different way, and that this is achieved through a genuine and robust people development philosophy.
As a hotel chain, Malmaison & Hotel du Vin has faced various employee challenges – in particular, the merging of two very different hotel chains, high staff turnover and a high proportion of staff with English as a second language – which it has solved through a carefully thought out, long-term strategy. The working environment has been viewed as a key factor in staff engagement, and the group’s benefits strategy reflects this.
A benefits programme was rolled out to all staff in 2006, offering financial benefits such as a company pension scheme, and was provided by Davidson Asset Management. In January 2008, Asperity was appointed to provide a voluntary benefits scheme – ‘Mal HdV Rewards’ – as a complement to the benefits already delivered through Davidson Asset Management. A learning and development programme was also developed internally to retain staff and progress them to management level.
Mal HdV Rewards offers almost 2,000 staff across the group discounts on a wide range of products and services and is a key strand of Malmaison’s people strategy.
Since the scheme launched in 2008, Asperity and Malmaison have continued to work together delivering and developing a communications programme to engage staff with the scheme. Posters and flyers promoting new and seasonal offers are sent to each hotel branch every month, and displayed in communal staff areas. Competitions and editorial content feature in the existing staff newsletter to promote awareness, and regular emails are sent to registered users to promote best offers, to encourage engagement after initial registration.
In the build up to Christmas 2009, a booster campaign was initiated to increase engagement amongst staff. Strategic delivery of marketing activity promoting Mal HdV Rewards – at no additional cost to the client – resulted in a significant increase in uptake and spend; in fact, 15% of the total scheme spend since its 2008 launch was achieved in December 2009 alone thanks to the communications campaign.
Around 35% of Malmaison’s 2000 UK-based staff are from Eastern Europe and the majority of those are Polish-speaking. During 2008, employee research suggested that this group was under-performing in its engagement with the scheme, and Malmaison looked to Asperity for ideas that could rectify this.
Asperity’s response was to produce a set of communications and a series of online web screencasts in Polish. The web screencasts are viewed like online videos and showcase the features of the benefits scheme and the savings that can be made.
The intervention was extremely successful and led to a 60% increase in benefits engagement with the Polish-speaking segment of the workforce, bringing the overall employee engagement to an exemplary 65%.
“Almost half of our staff have English as a second language and as a group of almost 900 they are a key part of our workforce. It’s critical that we engage with all of our people and the Polish language implementation of these videos was an excellent idea.”
Group Director of People Development, Malmaison
