COVinspired Crisis Management

As we enter what seems like the thousandth week of COVID-19 confinement, I thought I'd share some of the practices that our Guest Marketing and Experience teams at Accor have implemented the last few weeks in hopes of helping those who might need some inspiration and of course gather feedback on what else we could be doing to exit this period stronger and with even more robust business practices.

First and foremost, allow me to say that these practices are a combination of soft and hard practices gathered by experimenting in real-time with a simply fantastic group of individuals. It has become evident in the management of this crisis together that the HOW and the WHY behind the actions we are taking are as if not more important that WHAT actions are taken. While you might say (and you would be right) this sounds like a Simon Sinek flashback, it is indeed imperative that now more than ever, we all understand the WHY of our organizations, their reason for being and their reason for being in this particular crisis.

START WITH THE WHY

Prior to the crisis, the inherent WHY of a hospitality business for its head office workers might have seemed far removed from their day to day activities. Being mainly focused on the functional tasks of increasing the yield from digital acquisition, the appeal of the loyalty program or the operational efficiency of contact centres; the WHY often gets mistaken with the WHAT. 

As the pandemic took hold, confinement initiated, travel heavily restricted; the hotel business ground to a brutal halt along with domestic and industrialized economies. However, weeks into the crisis, never before has the WHY of the travel and hospitality business been as clear. To facilitate the natural need of humans to interact face to face, to accelerate the development of relationships so critical to achieving personal and business successes, to allow families to escape the suffocating realities of the city, to act as the meeting and restauration hubs of millions; in short the pandemic has given a meaning to hundreds of thousands of employees by showing them that they are a central part of the human journey and that they constitute a key facilitator for the economy and for the well-being of society as a whole. That beyond selling rooms, meals and events, we are helping businesses and families thrive, ensuring our group's employees are well taken care of through the establishment of our Employee ALL Heartiest fund and that furthermore, are helping healthcare workers and asymptomatic COVID patients seek solace. Our industry is a key player and enabler in global and local communities and never before has this been clearer.

ADOPT THE RIGHT ATTITUDE

In the middle of this incredible shift, our leadership beliefs and self-assured hubris about the resilience of our business model were shaken and a humble pie was served cold for several weeks as hubris turned to doubt and doubt lead to questioning the leadership style to adopt in what seemingly was going to be more than a simple V-shaped bounce-back. As reality dawned, a deep humility set into our attitudes, a humility that would be critical to ensuring a healthy dialogue was possible. 

As reiterated by Ludo Van der Heyden in a recent piece on Crisis Management in INSEAD Knowledge (1), humility is a valuable leadership attribute in the best of times but becomes critical during a crisis. He continues to day that "inevitably, you will make mistakes – (but) it’s how you respond that will prove your leadership mettle....as it is very difficult to convincingly pretend for an extended period of time... Frankly admitting responsibility, displaying proactive willingness to change course and consulting openly with others on the new direction will prevent errors from fatally undermining the collective effort".

COVID-19 is a dynamic situation that far exceeds any one leader's ability to capacity to lead alone. It makes everyone feel somewhat hopeless at times and this is exactly why crisis management should not hinge upon any one leader at any given time but rather should rely on a strong team of leaders across the organization that are connected together in a web of loose but rapid communication structures. 

Of course, the right attitude must be embodied by leaders and teams across the organization. A leadership of humility is ultimately servant leadership characterized by leadership in servitude to others, a focus on listening and understanding, and a high degree of collaborative distribution of power and control (2). In this context, it is critical to have and to maintain the highest degree humility with one's teams and offer everyone regardless of managerial level, employment type, role, etc. the opportunity to freely express their concerns and thoughts openly and with the same level of attention. In an unprecedented crisis, collective intelligence may be the difference between staying and going out of business.

INFORMATION & COMMUNICATION

The right attitude must be accompanied by the same commitment to transparent communication and the highest degree of unbiased information. While a servant leadership is often synonymous with open and transparent communication, it remains important to underline what it means to be open and transparent. For our team, this means exponentially increasing communications and doubling down on our previous practices.

Weekly TGIF Sessions

We launched our TGIF (Thank God it's Friday) sessions about 2 years ago as a way for senior executives and key project leaders to share important information, relevant KPIs, what's happened over the week and advance information on upcoming products or activities. The frequency was monthly and we've been constantly astonished to have 80%+ of head office teams participate in this optional meeting (I still contend that free coffee & juice, doughnuts and fruit play a strong role in this...;-)). As we entered the pandemic period, we decided to capitalize on this engagement and make these TGIF sessions weekly.

On a weekly basis, every Friday we thus have a TGIF that follows a somewhat structured agenda: update on global COVID situation and stats, business results (and impacts), business/project update, Q&A). While attendance has decrease to roughly 70% given the introduction of partial employment measures, this format has proven critical in remaining in touch in real-time with our teams and demonstrates a sense of deep trust, ownership and transparency amongst one another. Many questions certainly touch on the many human resource challenges presented by this unprecedented situation (thank you to all our Talent & Culture teams working night and day with authorities to protect employment and stay on top of evolving governmental measures); but increasingly in the last couple of weeks we've seen more and more questions emerge on how to further support the community, how to help our hotels manage the crisis, how to accelerate the business recovery, etc. This has been particularly helpful in highlighting areas of opportunity for me as I also chair the Commercial Crisis Management team. You cannot imagine the benefits of having real-time feedback from 200+ professionals every week, it truly ensures that you can look both at the forest and the trees (as these amazing team members have an in credible tendency to often state the obvious and the not-so-obvious which often get away from the most experienced management teams).

Rapid Management Decision Cascade 

As is often the case in crisis situation, many decisions are made in real-time with limited information and evolve rapidly. In order to avoid the difficult periods of information void that exist between materially impactful decisions) and that are exacerbated by social distancing measures); we've adopted a rapid cascade approach to critical decisions whereby within 1-2 hour of key internally available decisions being made at board/excom/functional management levels, a series of back to back meetings starting with al all hands meeting and immediately followed by a management team cascade occur. This cascade allows us to practically eliminate the information void and limit the destructive effects of here say (particularly when decisions imply employment activity and status. These rapid cascades are naturally supported and consistency/clarity ensured in the weekly TGIF sessions.

Management Team Huddles

None of these communications structures would be effective if the management team wasn't constantly connected and had regular contact together. While we cross paths multiple times a day across overlapping meetings, we've decided to have 3 recurring 30-minute morning coffee sessions as a management team to connect, assess our mood, and align on key priorities for our teams and for communication purposes. In these semi-structured meetings attended by our HR, legal and finance partners, we can have a true 360 degree quickfire update and ensure alignment as we kick-start our days.

These meetings are also critical in ensuring that we are fully informed on the personal circumstances of our team members. In a pandemic, circumstances change rapidly and thus we must be ready to adapt and change responsibilities accordingly. This may mean a team member delegating his or her responsibility to someone else, adopting partial activity to manage particular family issues (health, education), etc. From the outset, we had identified clear delegation of authority guidelines that allow us to navigate the changing situation and unanticipated cases, these regular get togethers have allowed us to adapt responsibilities and staff availability accordingly.

TOOLS

While attitude, communication and information are key, these can only be done effectively at scale through the adoption of proper technologies that facilitate working from home. Whether these include universal employee access to laptop, VPNs, or collaboration software among many others (both hardware and software); these technologies allow organizations to maintain and potentially increase productivity throughout market shocks. In China, where the outbreak started, Microsoft alone has seen a 500% increase in the use of the MS Teams meetings, calling, and conferencing usage, (and a 200 % of the tool on mobile devices) (3). As we had anticipated the transition to home office conditions 10-days prior to the activation of confinement measures in our home office, we we able to ensure training and upskilling on MS Teams which allowed us to rapidly adopt and transition to the use of extended Teams capabilities including its singular usage for meetings and calls, virtual team collaboration and real-time chat.

Nevertheless, in order to allow us to effectively manage our TGIF sessions with a similar level of seamlessness while controlling for crowd noise; we adopted Cisco Webex to manage our 200+ people sessions worldwide, all the while continuing to use Teams to collect feedback, questions and distribute minutes.

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

As the teams progress through the first stages of the confinement, air their personal concerns and achieve a certain level of comfort with the discomfort of the situation, the critical next step is to start planning for the future, as uncertain and unstable as it may seem. While this future may be sooner or later; in 6, 12 or 24 months, in the summer or fall, it is imperative to start sharing and co-developing your planning framework and hypotheses with your teams. Sharing the thinking process of emerging from an unprecedented crisis is an absolutely necessary step to ensure that the trust and collaboration built up in the early stages in maintained and cemented; not in a static version of a strategic framework or plan but rather grounded in an agile planning framework focused on a shared understanding of the way forward and the key metrics that underpin it 

We are currently entering this particular phase now. Having shared the state of the business with our teams, communicated the required cost cutting & furloughing required to manage cash flows and prepared the immediate response plans to secure the business and its relationship with customers, we've now started sharing what we expect to be the potential recovery scenarios, the hypotheses that underpin each and the different phases of recovery. 

As it is critical to identify the right metrics that "authentically reflects results and generates trust in the leadership", we have anchored the strategy into a number of phase by phase recovery based triggers that are founded on a combination of forward looking core business metrics and related leading indicators. The coming weeks will see us all come together around these scenarios and gain a shared understanding of the foundational requirements and underpinning metrics necessary to their realization.

There are certainly very choppy seas ahead, all with their fair share of perils and dangers, but as we steer through the storm, we do so with a sense of shared understanding and commitment that is comforting and will define us for years to come. I certainly want to thank all the Guest team members, and all of our business partners for being on this journey with us. 

Sources: 

(1) https://knowledge.insead.edu/operations/a-crisis-management-blueprint-for-covid-19-13716

(2) Greenleaf, R. K. (1977). Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness, New York: Paulist Press. 

(3) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/03/05/our-commitment-to-customers-during-covid-19/