PEOPLE FIRST - MILET LUKEY, VICE PRESIDENT PEOPLE & CULTURE, DORCHESTER COLLECTION: "WE WORK TOGETHER AS A TALENTED COMMUNITY" #PEOPLEFIRST
In our series "People First", human resources leaders share insights on their recruitment and retention strategy. |
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PEOPLE FIRST - MILET LUKEY, VICE PRESIDENT PEOPLE & CULTURE, DORCHESTER COLLECTION: "WE WORK TOGETHER AS A TALENTED COMMUNITY" #PEOPLEFIRST
In our series "People First", human resources leaders share insights on their recruitment and retention strategy. |
Category: Worldwide - Careers
- Interviews and portraits
- Career - Interviews - Industry leaders
Interview made by Sonia Taourghi on 2024-08-23
 Milet Lukey, Vice-President People & Culture for Dorchester Collection
Photo credit © Dorchester Collection
Milet Lukey, Vice President People & Culture for Dorchester Collection, answers our questions about recruitment, the onboarding process, and career development and gives key advice for a successful career in luxury hospitality.
Can you tell us more about your recruitment process?
While we do post our jobs on boards such as LinkedIn and Harri as well as recruit from top hospitality schools worldwide, each hotel also has a referral programme. This rewards employees who referred successful candidates. Due to the strong culture and high engagement of our employees – at 8.9 Overall Engagement we are in the top 5% of benchmark and turnover in the low 20%, word of mouth is a strong contributor to our recruitment efforts. We have also had success in tapping into our culinarians’ social media followers.
How do you integrate new talent?
All new employees are welcomed to Dorchester Collection attending a unique on-boarding experience, we refer to as the EXPLORE journey. This is six months duration, during which time they will attend a series of training courses all designed to integrate our new employees into the culture of Dorchester Collection, our service style and how we put our guests at the centre of all we do. The first two days of this training is ENGAGE – our induction programme. Regardless of the role a person will play within the company, everyone attends ENGAGE so that they understand our culture, our company Vision, and our Values.
What kind of development program do you offer your collaborators?
Our training programmes are designed to enable our employees to first become Ambassadors of Dorchester Collection, mastering their craft and becoming technical experts. At regular intervals we will meet with our employees to discuss their progress, understand their needs and their aspirations.
We offer formal internal development programmes at every level. For example, our learning management system called LEX delivers micro-learning sessions that are three to five minutes every day, available to everyone. As aspirations are formulated through the development review meetings, the employee can attend short in-person training courses lasting up to two hours. These take place monthly in each of our properties. Supervisory training is offered through a three-month programme called ELEVATE.
Managers can attend our EXPAND programme created with Franklin Covey based on the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Senior Leaders attend our five-day residential INSPIRE programme developed with Center for Creative Leadership, now in its 16th year. For our most senior roles, those who aspire to become a General Manager for example, we also offer APEX. This is an 18-month intensive personal and professional development journey. The development opportunities are available even in more specialist areas where we provided educational assistance and support. We invest in future leaders of Dorchester Collection through our Ultimate Leaders Programme (ULP). This is a twelve to eighteen months supervisory work rotation/experience and training for internal talent as well as hospitality graduates. Successful completion of the programme provides opportunities to move into an entry level supervisory/management role.
What internal mobility opportunities do you offer to your collaborators?
Attracting, retaining, and optimising talent is important to us and the mobility of our talent across the organisation is a priority. Both internal (within same hotels/office) and external (other hotels/office) transfers and promotions are highly encouraged as opportunities arise. To this end, we launched our Progression Framework initiative which acknowledges the varying aspirations and readiness of each individual and providing support and corresponding opportunities to grow and develop.
We have created pathways that are not just for succession planning or a vertical upward move, but those that are sideways and phased. Some of the pathways are for those who are “champions” – employees who are passionate about causes such as diversity, ESG, wellbeing. They will be able to learn, hone skills related to these, and participate and contribute to activities and programmes. For those who are happy to do their job they consider meaningful work and then step away to focus on their personal life, or it is family, sports, or pursuit of other interests outside of work, we celebrate and nurture this pathway.
Then there are those whose goal is to become an indispensable, authoritative expert in their role, e.g. be the best mixologist and not necessarily step to a leadership position. We love and support that as well. In some cases, some of our colleagues genuinely aspire to a profession they could not yet get into. And yet in other cases, people want to try out something different or gain a skill set. All good reasons to provide exposure to other parts of the business, through secondments, task force, cross exposure to other areas or hotels.
What would be your best advice to have a successful career in luxury hospitality?
You must love the idea of service – what it means to deliver excellence. A genuine love and caring for other people are key. This is the innate joy, which brings that natural smile and curiosity about what you can do to make a difference in the guest experience, and your own and colleagues’ experience.
Be open to learn. There is so much that you learn that is not only knowledge-based but more importantly, growing you as a person, an individual professional, and as a leader too. If you are open to learning, and you acknowledge you will continue to learn, then you also become agile. You must be quick on your feet and embrace change and even failing - but - always pick yourself up. Another important consideration is to find a company whose values mirror yours. This fosters alignment as well as a sense of belonging.
What human qualities are you looking for in talents?
Our employees thrive in a positive engagement environment. It is important that each employee believe and live our We Care philosophy. Alongside our values, we work together as a talented community with a shared commitment to each other and our loyal guests.
Passion for creating legendary experiences, personality to be your unique self and developing your talents.
Respect is key to ensure everyone feels valued and respected while embracing diversity and celebrating our differences.
Working together where teamwork is paramount done so with charm, ease and warmth and Creativity to ensure we are always evolving and inspiring.
Which labels did you earn as a quality workplace?
The 2024 Sunday Times Best Places to Work (Big Organisations) for Dorchester Collection UK hotels: The Dorchester, 45 Park Lane and Coworth Park and our London Corporate Office
Gold Award from Stonewall (LGBTQIA+ rights charity) and we secured coveted spot-on Stonewalls Top 100 LGBTQIA+ inclusive employers list.
Talent Development Team of the Year 2024 as awarded by the Institute of Hospitality
Finalist as Best Training Provider 2024 as awarded by British Training Awards
Finalist as Best Learning & Development 2024 (HR In Hospitality - pending the awards in September 2024)
What are the key CSR measures you have in place?
In 2023, we evolved from CSR to ESG, commencing annual ESG audits with an external partner. Diversity, inclusion, and belonging are the core of We Care philosophy, and we have mapped out a five-year diversity, inclusion and belonging strategy. Two key focus areas of this strategy are the disability gap and gender pay gap.
Gender Equity: We are proud to say we have excellent gender balance across Dorchester Collection, with a 50:50 balance in our C-Suite. However, we have seen across Europe that the gender pay gap is widening mostly due to the motherhood penalty and a lack of support for those going through menopause. To help us understand our working carer population (working parents and those with other caring responsibilities, such as elderly parents) we have added a new question to our bi-annual census to help us measure our working carer population, and measure how supported they feel in our bi-annual engagement survey. This will help us identify the right support our working carers need to ensure they can manage work, home life, and continue building their career. We are also refining our menopause policy and developing menopause training for leaders to help them support team members going through menopause to keep them in employment.
Disability and Neurodiversity: we have set a goal to increase our global representation of disabled and neurodivergent people, and we are particularly focused on increasing that representation at the leadership level. We added a new question to our bi-annual census to measure our population of neurodivergent colleagues (we are already measuring our disabled population) and measure feelings of inclusion and belonging amongst our disabled and neurodivergent population.
In the UK, we have partners with the Business Disability Forum, and we have signed up to the UK Government Disability Confident Scheme, starting at Level 1 as a Disability Confident Committed employer. To aid us in attracting disabled and neurodivergent talent, we developed and launched a global Inclusive Recruitment training. This is a 2-hour mandatory training for anyone involved in the recruitment process, designed to mitigate bias in the recruitment process (from job design, interviews, right through to onboarding) to create a fairer and inclusive experience for disabled and neurodivergent candidates.
We are currently developing an Inclusive Recruitment Toolkit for hiring managers, and another training session to support leaders in managing disabled and neurodivergent team members. In 2025, we will also begin posting job ads on job boards for disabled and neurodivergent jobseekers.
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