Malmaison & Hotel du Vin
Boutique hotel chain Malmaison & Hotel du Vin launched Asperity’s Reward Gateway benefits platform in January 2008. The scheme offers almost 2000 staff across the group discounts on a wide range of products and services and is a key strand of Malmaison’s people strategy.
Asperity has worked in partnership with Davidson Asset Management who provide a range of financial benefits to Malmaison staff and who have played a key role in delivering worksite communication.
Asperity and Malmaison have worked together on a rolling communications programme which sees posters of new and seasonal offers sent to each hotel branch every month. Posters, flyers, competitions and editorial in the existing staff newsletter have been used to drive employee uptake of the scheme.
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 three online web screencasts all 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 very successful and led to a 60% increase in benefits engagement with the Polish-speaking segment of the workforce.
“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.”
Sean Wheeler – Group Director of People Development, Malmaison
