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Episode Overview
In this episode of Culture in Action, Luke speaks to Kelly Johnson, the People and Culture Manager at Crowne Plaza Newcastle. Kelly shares her insights on transforming workplace culture, discussing the practical steps taken to address challenges like high employee turnover and poor communication. The conversation highlights the importance of rethinking communication rhythms, focusing on recognition, and emphasising work-life balance, all leading to improved employee engagement, better performance, and stronger business results. Kelly’s journey offers actionable insights for anyone in hospitality, HR, or passionate about creating positive workplaces.
Episode Transcript
Luke: Hello and welcome. I’m here in Newcastle, which I love, with Kelly. We’re in the Crowne Plaza, and we’re going to talk a little bit about culture.
Kelly: Yes.
Luke: Before we do, I saw Brené Brown once, and she said, “People always introduce what they do, not who they are.”
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: So, can we start with, who are you? What’s your story?
Kelly: I’ve been in the hospitality industry for 20-plus years, absolutely loving it. I fell into it a little bit out of school but progressed at various hotels in the Northeast. I went to Cornwall for a little bit. My husband’s a chef, so he worked for a great chef down there, and we absolutely loved it.
Luke: Who is it?
Kelly: He worked for Nathan Outlaw. Yes, we had loads of fun in Cornwall, and then we missed the Northeast so much that we came back up here and got our own business. We had a pub for five years, which was great, all through the COVID time. It was lots of fun and games. I have a little girl now; she is just three. So, I came out of the pub, and because I love the hospitality industry so much, I didn’t want to lose that. It’s been a natural flow for me to go into the HR side of things in a hospitality environment. That brings me here today, where I’m the People and Culture Manager here in Newcastle.
Luke: Thank you ever so much. I have two questions for you. One is: how did you meet your husband? Was it because you were both in hospitality?
Kelly: Yes, it was. Traditional. He was a chef, and I worked as a restaurant manager at the time. We used to argue across the pass, but then we ended up getting together.
Luke: Lovely.
Luke: And then the second one was, you told me off camera earlier that your GM is doing a wonderful job in the local community, encouraging people to start careers in hospitality. Was it a GM that pulled you in?
Kelly: It was, yes. I started with a part-time job at a local small hotel. When I came to leaving school, I did not know what I wanted to do. I didn’t really want to go to university. So, she said to me, “Why don’t you give hospitality a go as a career?” Because I’d watched her, the way she ran that hotel, and how much fun we used to have, and how every day was different, I thought, “Why not give it a go?” And then I’ve just progressed from there.
Luke: Rest is history.
Kelly: Yes, that’s it.
Luke: Cool. Let’s get to it, shall we?
Kelly: Yes.
Luke: So, we’re going to talk about workplace culture.
Kelly: Yes.
Luke: It feels like it would be wrong to start because it’s this amorphous topic that nobody seems to be able to pin down. So, I’m going to ask you the impossible question: what does workplace culture mean to you? What does a good one look like?
Kelly: I think to me, it’s about a team that feels valued and cared for, and that there’s an appreciation of the fact that they have a life outside of work. If we can look after their well-being and provide them with a place where they can come and feel like they belong and have the opportunity to develop. That doesn’t involve any sort of blame culture or anything like that.
Kelly: Positivity. I’ve always been quite positive with everything I’ve done in my life, and I’ve always worked better in a positive environment.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: So, that’s what I want to strive for.
Luke: Nice. Often, stats and stories tell you what that really looks like. So, have you got any stories or stats that would help you understand that you are building a great culture here?
Kelly: Yes. I guess when I started here, it was coming off the back of COVID. I think in the hospitality industry, in general, people were leaving the industry.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: This hotel, in itself, saw a high turnover, really high, nearly 70% in one year.
Luke: Of people left.
Kelly: Of people.
Luke: So, for every 100, 70 went.
Kelly: Yes. We knew we had to do something about it. We had an engagement survey that said we were poor at communication and that relationships between managers weren’t great. So, we did a lot of work to try and improve that, and we have reduced it massively towards the end of 2024 and going into 2025. The start, this first five months, has been great. We haven’t lost anybody, and if we have, it’s to progress their career somewhere else where there may not be an opening here.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: So, they’re not leaving for negative reasons now; they’re leaving for positive.
Luke: Yeah. There’s a really nice Richard Branson quote, something to the effect of: “Treat people so good that they don’t want to leave.” It feels like you’re doing that, and people are sticking with you.
Luke: Or you are creating a nice springboard for their career.
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: So, you’re now in a position where these stats are showing you a really positive message with lots of people sticking around. Do you have any stories from people? How do you know when you bump into people that things are going well, that they feel cared for, valued, etc.? What are some of the signs for that?
Kelly: I think as I walk around the hotel, you get a vibe. Because I spend a lot of time with the staff, walking around and saying hello and speaking to them every day, you get to know them, and you know if they are happy or not happy. If they’re having a bad day, I try and give them the time where I can talk to them and then see if there’s something I can do to help improve or help with whatever problem they’re having. Usually, just having that conversation tends to turn people around. But I have to say, over the last few months, the general vibe around the hotel is just really happy and positive. You can certainly see that shift from a year ago. The amount of problems that I end up having to deal with is very few now compared to where it was a year ago.
Luke: So, should we jump into that a little bit more then? When you first joined, what was it like? Not the specifics.
Kelly: Yeah. Because I know it’s always a little bit sensitive in HR. People felt they didn’t really know what was going on in the hotel. They felt like certain people got told things, but others didn’t. Perhaps their personal lives weren’t taken into account. So, if they wanted their birthday off or if they wanted a holiday for a specific reason, they would be waiting ages to get it approved. I think managers here were so focused on the actual business of running a hotel that perhaps they forgot that the people were…
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: As important.
Luke: Yeah. Nice. Okay, good. And then if we fast forward to now, if you look at some of the big themes, like if you were going for another job and you said it was a part of this big cultural transformation that led to improvements in engagement, it reduced employee turnover. These are the core things that we got right.
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: What are the big things that you think you got right?
Kelly: Communication, definitely. That was one of the biggest things that everybody had a problem with. The second one is building relationships with our team across the hotel. So, spending more time, having conversations with people rather than sending an email. It’s far more effective actually spending the time talking to each other than it just being kind of faceless on an email or an instruction.
Luke: Indeed, and…
Kelly: Listening. Listening to the feedback that we get from our staff as well.
Luke: So people know that there’s actually a relationship rather than just a transaction.
Kelly: Yes. I guess you see that the same in a guest experience, right? Everyone’s been to a reception desk where they get checked in and they feel processed.
Luke: Yeah. That’s rather than…
Kelly: Actually looked after.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: We expect our staff to be able to do that with guests, so we should do it with each other as well.
Luke: Yeah, exactly. So communication helps people feel informed, which was one of the problem areas. It helps people feel a sense of transparency and likely trust. There are no silos of information.
Kelly: We shifted how we prioritized in different meetings. Before, it would always be business first. The numbers, what business is on the books, cost-cutting, payroll savings here, there, and everywhere. But now, we prioritize
people first. Anything in the people calendar coming up, we usually put a special event on once a month for staff. Lots of fun activities in the month as well. That’s the focus first. Rota-ing was high up there as part of that and giving people the correct work-life balance. That’s now the forefront of every meeting that we hold. Whether departmentally or from the General Manager himself, he always puts the people section first.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: So we’ve shifted how we prioritize things in the business.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: To be much more people-focused.
Luke: We have a lot of these conversations that there’s a clear value chain that ends in guest experience. The step before that is normally what drives the P&L outcomes and how decisions are made. You are a perfect example of this formula, which is: reducing employee retention challenges, so more people stick with you, should enhance guest experience. You get people working better together, which normally enhances performance, improves guest satisfaction outcomes, and improves the numbers as a byproduct. The step before that is normally in employee engagement. The classic issues that you talk about, people don’t feel informed, they don’t feel connected, they don’t feel valued, surface. But it’s the changes in the culture that you need to drive all of those outcomes. It’s an input-level problem rather than an output-level problem, normally.
Luke: So we’ve talked about what you did. It would be really useful of those three buckets to just talk about how you did it. Because the practical bits, I know there’s always unique context, but how you actually made a difference when it comes to communication or rota-ing, I assume, to better reflect and represent people’s personal lives. And so on. Do you mind picking those off for us?
Kelly: I guess we got all the Heads of Departments together. So it started with those guys, and said, “Right, this is what we want. We would like you all to prioritize your people first.” So, you put your team meeting in. We got them set up on the Mo app where they could communicate directly with their teams as well. So we said, “This is the platform we want to use. We want to forget all the old WhatsApp groups, email, personal email addresses. Let’s focus it all on in work time and get them to message everybody through there and get the team engaging with that.” Then any important messages—we constantly reiterated the same message.
Kelly: We talked about having a team meeting on the same day each month. We talked about even taking people off-site for a coffee chat, so you’re getting a bit of out of the workplace. You’re not just having to do it in here. We talked about fun activities, so they might provide pizzas for a team event while they’re doing training. It’s just all those little things that got the staff more engaged in the meetings in the first place. Then when they had them there, it was, “Right, let’s listen. What are your concerns?” Giving them a chance to talk as well and tell us what their issues were, whether it be holidays or rota or work-life balance. We shifted the change in priority from just, “We’ve got this many covers on this day and we’ve got this big event on Saturday.”
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: So we’ve shifted away from that transactional stuff again.
Luke: Okay. Nice. It seems like a playbook formed: do this with team meetings,
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: Communicate prominently on Mo, have these fun social times. Was that a conscious effort, or did you learn through experimentation and get there?
Kelly: We knew what we wanted to achieve with the meetings and with improving communication. We did try various things. We started off with a Head of Department meeting, and then we implemented a supervisor meeting because we still felt there was a block from getting from Heads of Department down to their supervisors, then down again to the wider team.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: So we tried to include the supervisors more, and then we have an engagement team as well, which we meet with once a month. A staff member from each department is nominated to come forward with any issues or concerns that the rest of the team have, and they take part and give us feedback. So, what we did well, what the staff would like to see us do more of. We’re trying to reach everybody, and Mo’s been the focus. We’ve directed everybody to that in order for everybody to be singing off the same page.
Luke: So we’re all just using one platform.
Kelly: Yes. It’s all in one place, and it’s easy for everybody to use and get on board with. That’s been a huge help for me to try and focus everybody’s attention.
Luke: Just in one place.
Kelly: In one place. And then going around and saying, “Right, have you checked this? Have you checked that? Have we checked that?” Just having those conversations to reinforce that.
Luke: Yeah, if you want to feel informed, here’s the one destination to go to. Here’s the one that we use. Makes sense. So we’ve talked about problems. We’ve talked about things that you did. We’ve talked about transition, getting Heads of Department together, giving them this playbook of things that they can do.
Luke: And some of the impact that had. I’m imagining you’ve done this transition.
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: And then stuff stops working, because it always does. Talk to us a little bit about some of the barriers that you saw in sustaining these changes.
Kelly: One of the big barriers is because the hotel is so big and so busy operationally, it’s finding the time for some of the operational managers to actually fit in what we’re asking them to do or prioritize what we’re asking them to do with putting people first. I think we just kept reiterating, and at the start, a lot of the problem was consistency. They may have held a specific meeting or done a specific staff event for one month or two months, and then it dropped as soon as the hotel got busier.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: So, at that point, I would step in and say, “Come on, we need to get back into doing this.” The rotas again, the rotas would improve for so long, and then one week would be hectic. But I think the fact that we had started the initial changes anyway and improving people’s work-life balance and showing more care about our team, what we’re finding now is actually our staff are a bit more engaged and a little bit more tolerant and…
Luke: Almost.
Kelly: Yes. We have improved an awful lot, and there are not as many issues as there were previously. But because we are communicating with our team better, and we have a lot more staff that are engaged enough that they want to offer and jump in and help. Whereas before it was a little bit like, “Oh no, I’ve done my few hours for this week. That’s it.”
Luke: A positive environment is not all just about good news all the time, right? It’s often about transparency and knowing that there’s rough with the smooth.
Kelly: Yes, that’s it. I think if you have that ultimate care for your team and you do communicate well with them, then you get a lot back. You get a lot back from your team.
Luke: And maybe two things then that run from that is: how do you get managers to care?
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: That they should care for their people because you might think instinctively that they do.
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: But you need to motivate them to want to change and adopt these new meetings and consistently run the rotas and all that. So talk to us a little bit about that.
Kelly: I couldn’t really put my finger on one specific thing other than by me talking to these managers that may have done the same thing with their rota for however many months or years prior, just talking to them and saying, “Actually, look at it from your staff member’s point of view.”
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: “How would you feel if you couldn’t have that day off to go to a gig in town, or couldn’t go out with your friends on one Saturday of the month, or couldn’t play football, or whatever it may be?” I’ve tried to say to them, “How would you feel if that was you?” And just try and say, “You have to be a lot more open to the well-being of your team now. With that, you’ll see that you get a lot more hard work, and their lives will essentially be easier.”
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: “It’s what you put in, you get back.” That’s what I’ve tried to go down the route of, and it does seem to be working.
Luke: Cool. Good. Flip the perspective.
Kelly: Yeah. Nice.
Luke: Often the other thing we see when people are trying to drive culture change is that when people aren’t fully committed to the change, and therefore maybe not fully motivated to do it because they haven’t seen the benefits yet, is how you think about making it dead easy for people to do it. It would be great to get your sense of how have you done that here?
Kelly: Well, I guess the traditional view of HR is that they have to instruct people to be able to do all of these things.
Luke: Fire people well, or hire people well.
Kelly: Yes, do them correctly. Hire, fire, get everything right within their department. But there’s a lot of pressure on managers to be able to do that. They are also busy in their day-to-day job roles. So, what we wanted to do essentially is provide them one place, just take a lot of the extra admin work and paperwork out of their general day-to-day job. So, one platform that they could offer recognition and reward. They can communicate important messages about business or team meetings or team events, and get staff’s feedback as well. Hence why we had Mo, and we thought, “This is the ideal platform, and it’s easy to use.” That’s what I wanted to get across to the managers so they didn’t have to spend hours emailing every single staff member. They could just do one quick message and send it out there, and it’s done. If they’ve had a team member that’s done something great, they quickly go on the app, instant reward, and that’s thanked that team member, and that’s done. It’s not something like, “Oh, I’ll have to remember to do that next week.” It’s instant. The impact for us that that’s had in enabling the managers to achieve a lot more in their day-to-day, it’s been huge. Now they know how easy it is to use. They are literally, and I mean people that are not particularly computer savvy or anything like that, they are just able to do so much more that has a more powerful impact for their team.
Luke: So you’ve told us about loads of really good things that you’ve done.
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: But if you want to create a trusting environment for your people, you need to also be able to get it wrong.
Kelly: Yes. Otherwise, people fear failure, and they won’t do anything about changing their behaviors or exposing themselves.
Luke: It would be great to hear an example of something that you got wrong or maybe that you tried and then had to iterate on to really get right.
Kelly: At the start of the journey, we were so focused on improving the communication across the hotel that we potentially put too many meetings in the diary. The feedback from the team was that “How are we ever going to be able to get everybody in for those meetings?” Or it was starting to impact negatively because it was meaning that we couldn’t always be pulled away from service, so some people missed the important stuff anyway.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: So, we had to really strip it back and decide what was important, which ones we wanted to focus on, and just keep those. Then use Mo for the rest of the communication. We overkilled because we were so concerned about getting the team communicated to better that we went too far. So, keeping it simple is definitely the best way.
Luke: You are so far from on your own in that situation. We see companies that were forced to go remote because of the environment, or companies that have tried to adopt hybrid, always overload meetings.
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: And they always end up spending their entire day in meetings. It’s this blend between synchronous conversation meetings, which are your really high-leverage opportunities to get the important stuff covered, and then how we think about asynchronous communication, which means I can check in, I can consume, I can contribute at a point that works for me. In a shift-oriented organization, that makes life so much easier to be able to participate and consume at the points that work for you, right?
Kelly: Yes, that’s it. We have a night team that obviously work completely different hours to the rest of our team, and they are only a small team. There are five of them. It was really important to us that we didn’t miss anybody out. So, varying different times of communication and focusing it all in one area was the only key to get everybody engaged.
Luke: Indeed. So, the very hard inclusion and belonging.
Kelly: Yes, that’s it.
Luke: So you’ve shared some wonderful learnings, some solutions to the problems that you had initially. If I take you right the way back to those initial meetings that you were having, that were all business performance, “show me the number” type conversations, that you’ve flipped completely on its head now to orientate around people.
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: We all know that those things are never forgotten. So, it would be great to get a sense of how your cultural improvements have led to those improved outcomes, on either the guest or on business performance.
Kelly: Previously, the discussion about performance and our guest feedback would always be held within management meetings. Now that it’s publicized to the wider team and we direct the team. So if a specific area is slightly underperforming, not quite where we want to be, we will direct the team to focus on that area. You can certainly see the feedback scores jump up, and that’s just by us communicating that out to the wider team knowing…
Luke: That it’s a problem.
Kelly: Yeah. And therefore, they want to jump on it.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: Yes, that’s it. It might be that it’s a arrival experience, so we may be falling short a little bit in our feedback in that area one month, and so we’ll highlight that to the team and we’ll take on any ideas that they have. We have done; we’ve got a popcorn machine that we bring out at certain times of the day when guests are arriving. We’ve got bits and pieces for children to entertain them, and we just tweak our focus and the team’s focus to then provide a better experience in that area.
Luke: They have all the answers then, right? They just need to know it’s a problem and…
Kelly: They just need to know it’s an area of focus, and then they know what to do, and the team are great. They just jump on it and focus on that area. And you see it shift.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: That’s just us communicating that out to the wider team or putting a little, maybe it’s a little jokey slant on it, like a bit of competition between departments. One’s doing a little bit higher on the scores than the other.
Luke: So, breakfast might be doing higher than dinner.
Kelly: We just challenge them and put a bit of a motivational slant on it. And you’ll see a bit of friendly competition, all to improve certain areas.
Luke: Okay. So we’ve talked about some of the ways in which if you inform your people, they’ll jump on the problems, and they normally know the answer.
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: Which is great. So you’re solving problems faster. It would also be really useful to see how that translates to impact created. You’ve mentioned something before — the impact on staff mentions?
Kelly: If any of our staff get their name mentioned on any of the review sites, TripAdvisor or our company review site, we instantly give them a five-pound reward. So, it’s a bit of a motivational tool for them to give great guest experiences. In time, we’re seeing now that we’re getting a lot of repeat business because of that, and they are reviewing the staff again, and mentioning the names again. Saying, “Oh, Sally looked after us last time, we’re back again because she was great.” That’s again impacting our scores in the review sites. I think it puts us as a more prominent hotel in the city where people want to stay because we’ve got good reviews. We’re consistent in customer service; that consistency is improving because we’re not losing as many staff. It keeps us as busy as we are. It’s bringing that profitability by keeping us full.
Luke: Yeah. So you’ve got more people coming back.
Kelly: Yeah.
Luke: Positive occupancy. Always a winner in this industry.
Kelly: Yes, definitely.
Luke: Right. As we get to the end of our conversation, I would love to just take a couple of nuggets from you.
Kelly: Okay.
Luke: Golden ones. Maybe even platinum ones. Just for any other HR leader that might be listening and thinking about what are the practical steps, the actionable things that I can do to start to have a transformational impact like you have.
Kelly: Definitely, number one, improve communication. Definitely. I think reward and recognition, even a simple thank you to your team, and then prioritizing their work-life balance and their well-being. I think if staff feel cared about and listened to and communicated well with, then you will get a far more engaged team and the longevity that you want them to work with you for. Then they’ll become more interested in their career development with you and their prospects, and they’ll want to stay within your company. That’s what we’re starting to see here.
Luke: How would your GM answer the question differently?
Kelly: I don’t know if he would. I think he would definitely say, “Look after people. People are your number one.” Effectively, look after your people, you’ll end up with a better business outcome.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: More profitability, I think ultimately. Over the years that he’s worked in the hospitality industry, he’s probably come to realize that as well. It’s not all about the business; it’s about the people that we’ve got working for us.
Luke: Yeah.
Kelly: And that’s the main thing.
Luke: It’s great to hear that your GM would say exactly the same thing that you would, and that people formula is going to stick with me. Thank you ever so much for spending time with me, inviting us to your beautiful hotel. Treating us to lunch. That was lovely as well. Nice. I am so pleased to provide a platform for you to share your advice to people on what you’ve done.
Kelly: It’s great. It’s great. We couldn’t be without it now.
