RIU
Hotels &
Resorts
Mentoring and talent retention
Client challenge (2022)
Any RIU Hotels & Resorts guest knows they will find the chain’s culture and DNA at any of the company’s more than 100 hotels worldwide. Every RIU employee champions the chain’s values, which is a priority for RIU when onboarding new staff, addressing generational renewal or attracting talent. The best way to guarantee effective recruitment, attract talent and ensure imminent generational handover and innovation is by involving leaders in the new talent onboarding process with mentoring roles so they transfer these values.
As an essential stage during the RIU Ingenium programme, Pere Torrens, the Corporate Training Director, wanted to train the technical service senior managers at all Caribbean resorts in soft mentoring skills so they could help contribute to the young talent onboarded in these areas as well as their current teams. The programme was completely in line with RIU’s culture and identity through custom, specialist support.
How Metahotel helped
From May to November 2022, Metahotel provided technical service managers in Mexico, Jamaica, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and the Pacific zone with a bespoke coaching and mentoring programme. It included the following milestones:
- The RIU Ingenium programme was launched for participants in collaboration with HR-Training Spain and HR-Training Mexico.
- Four group training sessions, which worked on skills, tools and methodologies as hotel mentors. The bespoke sessions included ad hoc content, tools and a methodology to implement the role of mentor and develop each participant’s leadership skills.
- One individual coaching process with each manager. We gave custom support to adapt capacity-building content and tools to RIU’s specific contexts. Moreover, individuals’ skills were also developed.
- Two assessments of the programme’s potential difficulties and a hotel mentor© competency analysis. The latter is a Metahotel tool based on five mentor competencies and 25 behaviours a mentor should show. Measurements were taken at the beginning and the end of the programme to see how each leader had evolved.
- Best practices session to extrapolate learning.
- We provided regular feedback and alignment with HR-Training and the participants so we could adapt to the mentoring candidate selection process and the operating pace at any time.
Outcomes
- All participants (100%) completed the programme and broadened their mentoring soft skills. The assessments and feedback improved professionals’ awareness and learning about their role as a mentor, as they had mainly focused on their technical skills before.
- Staff conflicts within teams were resolved. This programme’s learnings helped participants broaden their skills to lead their current teams. With this, they resolved conflicts and improved motivation without HR having to intervene.
- Methodology and mentoring strategies were aligned in the five locations so that mentors and mentees can now follow the same road map. This is useful when talent has to move between locations as it will not affect professionals’ development processes.
Client testimonial
“For some of these managers, it was the first time they had been in contact with a coach. They are experts in their fields and the coach’s support allowed them to broaden their outlook to aspects they had never anticipated or that they somehow believed were beyond their reach while highlighting the importance of their cumulative experience.”
Pere Francesc Torrens Martín
Director Corporate Training Department