Case study: How HSH promotes employee development

What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2019 Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report HSH identified a range of material issues, such as guest engagement and communications, diversity and inclusion, physical and data security, climate change adaptation, human rights. Among these, promoting employee development stands out as a key material issue for HSH.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards              

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The reporting organization shall identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups HSH engages with:

How stakeholder engagement was made to identify material issues

To identify and prioritise material topics HSH engaged with its stakeholders through webinars and calls with executive and sustainability committees in its global operations, as well as discussions with several non-governmental organisations, think tanks, sustainability experts and regulators.

What actions were taken by HSH to promote employee development?

In its 2019 Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report HSH reports that it took the following actions for promoting employee development:

• Implementing a Corporate Management Training (CMT) programme
• A bespoke initiative that develops HSH’s emerging talent, HSH’s CMTs come from eight countries and have worked an average of 4.4 years in seven operations across eight functions during their programme. In addition, HSH’s traineeship (interns and management trainees) programmes saw 904 positions being filled globally in 2019.

• Promoting cross-exposure
• HSH’s cross-exposure programme allows employees to understand different operations and cultures. It also provides the host operations with the opportunity to work with people of different nationalities. In 2019, HSH organised more than 84 global cross-exposure opportunities, and was pleased to have received feedback that these were extremely beneficial and rewarding for the participants. In particular, HSH’s Beijing team hosted 10 colleagues from Paris for three weeks to share their knowledge of a different operation and culture.

• Enabling staff to explore new career opportunities
• HSH is in the process of preparing for Peninsula hotel openings in London, Yangon and Istanbul. As part of its employee development strategy, HSH created an internal website specifically for its staff to explore possible career opportunities at its new hotels. HSH is offering hotel opening opportunities for trainees, where recently graduated students will have the chance to work before becoming part of the pre-opening team.

• Providing training
• In 2019, there was a strong focus by HSH on training programmes, with 23,000 registrations of different online training modules – the equivalent of three online modules per employee. Of these modules, around 320 were bespoke training programmes created uniquely for HSH.

Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?

The GRI Standard addressed in this case is: Disclosure 404-2 Programs for upgrading employee skills and transition assistance programs

Disclosure 404-2 Programs for upgrading employee skills and transition assistance programs corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Targets: 8.2, 8.5

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

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References:

1) This case study is based on published information by HSH, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original, please revert to the original on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Disclosure Database at the link:

http://database.globalreporting.org/

2) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/

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