Mo contributes to 17% decrease in employee turnover at Atlas Hotels
“Employee engagement and recognition unlock the guest experience for us, and it’s helpful that we have one home for our culture and recognition”.
Sarah Brocklebank, HR Director, Atlas Hotels
Overview
Atlas Hotels is a well-known hotel franchise group that owns 58 hotels across the UK, including Holiday Inn Express, Holiday Inn and Hampton by Hilton brands. We spoke with Sarah Brocklebank, Atlas’s HR Director, to learn more about their use of Mo.
In 2018, Atlas introduced Mo to 900 employees, which has since grown to 1500.
Prior to Mo, Atlas used an offline program to reward and recognise their employees that was not used in the same way across every site. With a significant percentage of their workforce consisting of desk-less staff, Atlas was seeking a platform that could help them improve employee engagement and company culture, reduce turnover, and enhance the guest experience.
The Challenge
Before the implementation of Mo, Atlas used site-based initiatives to recognise and reward their employees. This involved using something they called “Smile Points”, which were tracked by local managers through spreadsheets. Rewards were then distributed manually to staff to acknowledge exceptional customer service, teamwork, and positive customer feedback.
A big challenge for the Atlas team was that this offline program varied across different sites, leading to inconsistencies in the employee experience and a lack of visibility across the entire hotel network. To address these challenges, Atlas wanted to find a platform that could provide consistency, visibility, and recognition to enhance company culture.
A second challenge then came in 2020-2021 when Atlas and other hospitality industry businesses faced various challenges due to the pandemic and Brexit, including increased employee turnover, lower engagement, and lower customer satisfaction as a result. In response, the team turned to Mo.
“When we do something celebratory, we love funnelling everything through Mo so everyone can see, and that’s a big part of bringing the culture at Atlas to life”.
Sarah Brocklebank, HR Director, Atlas Hotels
How Mo Helped
In 2019, Atlas worked with Mo to relaunch their values and create their desired company culture. This enabled the organisation to connect reward and recognition to their values.
As the pandemic meant considerable disruption and lots of new managers, the Mo team worked with Atlas to educate and train managers on using Mo to facilitate better communication and recognition, as well as connect with their new teams.
Atlas employees can access Mo to view mentions, leave comments and reactions, and provide peer-to-peer recognition. Atlas also uses Mo to conduct an Employee of the Quarter award program. This process reduces the administrative burden of running awards and helps to incentivise and recognise outstanding performance.
Sarah explains, “We wanted something that wasn’t too corporate. Having an app-based platform that is easy to use and log onto was crucial as we have a huge desk-less workforce. We feel that Mo has such good adoption for this reason”.
Mo has saved Sarah and her team a great deal of time and energy: “If we didn’t have a solution like Mo, it would take up a lot of admin time and reconciliation from a finance perspective. Our employees prefer to interact with a platform and use a digital solution as opposed to an offline solution. We are enabling our employees to get what they want from us with Mo”.
“All of the people I have worked with at Mo have been brilliant. They have been responsive, ideas people, solutions focused and also people you want to engage with. They want to understand where you’re trying to get to and help you get there”.
Sarah Brocklebank, HR Director, Atlas Hotels
Results
Atlas discovered a correlation between increased Mo usage and higher scores in guest engagement surveys.
“In a world where managers are looking at us and saying ‘we’re having issues with turnover, how do I solve it’ we can give them Mo to do exactly that”.
Sarah and her team have seen first-hand that Mo can help hotels address issues with employee turnover. We found that hotels with the highest usage of Mo also had the highest score on engagement and guest satisfaction, and had a 17% lower turnover than hotels with low usage.
Since February 2022, Atlas has actively promoted Mo to their employees and reported a significant decrease in monthly employee turnover since September 2022, which continues to be an onward trend into 2023. When they measured engagement in December 2022, Atlas saw an improvement in engagement on Mo, with a 265% increase in the total number of Moments shared, compared to February 2022.
