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Three ways to empower your employees H O W T O

ANAND NARASIMHAN IMD Shell Professor of Global Leadership and Dean of Faculty and Research

ScandicHotels offer best practices to increase employee engagement for digitally nativeworkforces. ScandicHotels, one of theNordics’ leading hotel groups, embarked on an empowerment journey back in 2015. The differencewas, back then, therewas no crisis to act as a catalyst; theywere instead facing an IPOand preparing newvalues and a newvision for 2020. Following company research, the spotlight fell on the service experience, as it became clear this affected a hotel’s rating and its ability to attract bookings. At the time, Booking.com, Hotel.Com, TripAdvisor, AirBnBand socialmediawere setting the pace. Less than 50%of ScandicHotels’ employeeswere empowered to decide about impacting customer experience. If theywanted their focus to become “that verymoment their guests interactedwith them”, theywould have to empower the staff.

And so the educating process began. Lena Bjurner, SVPof HRandSustainability at the time andSiri Wikander, chargedwith “MakingEngagement Happen Through Learning andCommunication” asDirector of PeopleGrowth, were at the helm. Here are threeways to empower your employees, based on the experience of ScandicHotels: Look into the science, read about the trends, and leverage the latest technology. ScandicHotels learned that their people wanted to get away fromlong e-learning modules designed for consumption on a laptop. “Only half of our peoplewere engagingwith the Intranet,” saidBjurner, who nowheads up theHRAssociation for Sweden. Wikander andBruner bravely advocated the use of Fuse, a newand untestedmobile- native, socialmedia-style platformthat 1. Gofind out howyour people like to learn today

allowed employees to share best practice (such as how to split a check, ormake a seasonal cocktail) with each other directly. The key insight was for topmanagement to stop commandingwhat people needed to learn, and to start curating knowledge that employees like to sharewith each other. "Only half of our people were engaging with the Intranet." We need to shift fromlooking good and appearing smart to adopting a learning approach. ScandicHotels took on the mindset that it was “under-skilled, didn’t know, and and not sure of whomto ask”. Agrowthmindset encourages employees to move beyond their own sense of limitation and helplessness in order to learn from otherswithout explicitly being told to do so. 2. Move fromafixedmindset to a growth mindset