Talent Strategies for Competitive Markets - Lauren Phelps

Josiah: 0:00

Today, you'll learn how to attract and retain top talent from someone who has opened a new hotel at the peak of our industry's labor shortage in a highly competitive market and then maintain the lowest turnover rate in our comp set after that. Lauren Phelps started her career in strategy consulting before working for investment firms and opening a new hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley a few years ago and running it as general manager. In this episode, you'll learn what she found helpful for recruiting and retaining talent on her teams. Hiring in Silicon Valley is extremely hard. Hiring in hospitality is extremely hard. You had to do both in a very hot market. We'd like to talk about talent broadly, but maybe starting with recruiting, I think if we take us back to that moment, how did you think about hiring people in this hyper-hyper competitive market and getting the sort of caliber person that you needed to build this new hotel?

Lauren: 1:16

Totally Well. Okay, I'm stealing from lots of great thinkers in this space, so I won't pretend to take credit, but I think for us a huge guiding force was Danny Myers and Light and Hospitality Concept. If your employees are happy, everything goes from there. And also not coming from a place of desperation, but rather sort of using that lens of product market fit to also find the right people, and you also have to test things in that. Do we need this position? Is there a way to combine these positions? Can we create a new position? Oftentimes F&B and rooms don't work together. Is there a way that we have them, that they should?

Josiah: 1:52

So you're retaining this very curious approach to how might we do this right? You're throwing away all the orthodoxies and I'm thinking okay, I have this vision for who we want to be as a culture, as an organization, as a business, right, and then you know, we're going to test a lot of things. We need the right folks on your team to do that.

Lauren: 2:11

You need the right folks and I'm very proud we had incredible retention. We have still, as far as I see, incredible retention at the hotel. You know some of the best in the comp set, which was one of the things. I mean to be totally transparent, that was one of the things I insisted that I be incentivized on. Like my pay should be determined by retention and attrition of employees, because that is where the brand lives and dies in an independent world. So that is one of the things that I was the most focused on and I had a fantastic team that helped us take the hotel from, you know, at opening. We opened in July 2021. Killer time to open a hotel in Silicon Valley, as everyone knows and we opened. I think we had 12 or 15 people sort of helping us pre-open and then we scaled it to 120, you know, in the last I think we're at 120 in November of last year and you know that obviously waivers with seasons, but it was bringing people on that were excited about you know. You, it's sort of a motto flame. You know, people who are excited about something new are often the people that you like want to get in and you have a. You have a beautiful problem of having a little bit I mean literally too many cooks in the kitchen sometimes. But like I don't know, I think more voices is good. I think more voices means more ideas, means more things to try, and so I was actually surprised we had our fair share of hiccups. But I think creating that culture of buy-in, creating that sense of impact and finding people who were energetic about the things we were energetic as in building something new, that was how we did it and it worked out pretty well.

Josiah: 3:39

A great culture can become magnetic right. It becomes this environment where the people that you have are going to be so happy there they're going to tell their friends, and referrals, of course, is a great way of recruiting. Was there anything you mentioned going from, you know, 1215 to 120, 130? That's a lot of hiring. What did you find to be useful in terms of sources or ways to attract talent?

Lauren: 4:02

So I mean for sources, there's the tried and true methods, A lot of it. I was surprised that this worked. We like, if we had folks we liked at other businesses, we would leave them a card, we'd leave them a note, we'd follow up with them, you know. Just your business card, yeah, we had a little card made that was like we think you're great, we think you're really great. Please call us. I love that. Sorry for anyone who for whom we kind of poached your employees. We did it with love. But I think, like, honestly, where we had conversion was at the interview time, like in the time of the interview, once again stealing theories from other folks, but the sort of autonomy and mass, the Daniel Pink principle, the theory of autonomy, mastery and purpose. So helping folks understand that, no matter their position, there was going to be I mean relatively more autonomy because we fewer sort of strictures on that Mastery was getting them to feel that the best they did every day was the best they could do for their other fellow employees, the best they could do for the guest. And then purpose was the creation of this new thing. And we found that people that were excited by that in that interview stage tended to convert to full time and tended to stay.

Josiah: 5:13

So you're sort of in sales mode here.

Lauren: 5:15

Oh, 100%.

Josiah: 5:15

This isn't just like I'm going to interrogate you and trying to like there's a bit of the vetting process. But I imagine through your process you did some of that and so when you know you have a talented person here, you're in sales mode.

Lauren: 5:29

Yes, oh, and I was. I mean we did all sorts of things. Yeah, I was a full aims all salesperson. I mean that was really my job. I think, like folks, what I would always say and what I believe to this day, is like I didn't run the hotel. The director of rooms ran the hotel, the guest experience agents ran the hotel, the waitresses ran the hotel, the baristas did I just enabled them to do that to the best of my ability, and that meant bringing in people who knew way more than I did about all the things that we needed to accomplish. And so, yes, if I was a bed salesperson for the aims, well, I think we would have failed.

Josiah: 6:01

How did do you feel your interview process? Aside from some of the elements that you mentioned, was there anything else you did in that interview process you think was a little atypical? Did you have more people interview or what did that look like, for you Did a lot of interviews.

Lauren: 6:15

We had people tell us what they would change about the hotel. That was one of the questions I always asked and that was a fun sort of way to engage, the way they thought about it and you could kind of suss out how they approach the job and look like so many folks in this industry are doing this job alongside all very busy lives, alongside other things they have going on, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But having them sort of think in even in the interview moment about what they might do there, I think helped them envision being there in a way that I think interviews can often feel sort of interrogative and you're feeling defensive and you're trying to justify these things about yourself rather than being asked like, okay, blank slate, what would you do? And that's a little bit more fun, exciting, yeah.

Josiah: 7:02

And so you're getting that buy-in, you're encouraging that buy-in and it's like how might we improve this? And then, if I go back to what we talked about earlier, if you do hire that person, you're allowing them to continue that journey and actually continue to build out this experience design or the journey mapping.

Lauren: 7:17

And you're validating their thought process, even if you don't go with the ideas they said. I mean, lots of them were not feasible, unfortunately. You know, people are like, well, just blow out these walls. And it's like, well, I can't do that, but like service offerings and partnerships, and a lot of these things came from those ideas, from those moments and a lot of our programming came from those moments because those, the folks that we hired, like I think I referenced earlier, they're in the community. They know what people want to see, they know what's going to bring people in on the, on the sort of slacked weekends which where we're trying to get you know, concert business, sports business, it's local, so you know how do we get those folks in the door and they are the best source of knowledge there.

Josiah: 7:57

I love that and I imagine that philosophy is not only going to acquiring talented people, getting them on the team, getting buy-in, but also for retention you mentioned. You know a key performance indicator you're looking at is that retention best in class in your comp set you're able to succeed with that. Was there anything else in terms of how you operated that you thought was helpful in terms of retention and keeping talented people and helping you hit that number?

Lauren: 8:22

Oh man, there were so many little things. It's like the culmination of a million things, I think, making it really easy to access me and sort of me framing my position as a spokesperson rather than a someone who's had at the top of a pyramid. I was at the bottom of a pyramid that was inverted and I had office hours. I mean, I just stole every trope that I could, but making my door very open, because that's where we learned stuff. And if people were ever afraid of my reaction to things or any of the other managers' reactions, for that matter, not just mine then we would fail to learn. And so, really having a culture of open, candid feedback. We had executive meetings, we had sort of like airings of the grievances which were really productive, and like it's very stressful opening a hotel in the middle of COVID, so it was also a good way to let off steam, I think just creating a very sort of familial. All of that resulted in a very familial culture which I think like back to that notion of a flywheel, like the faster you get information, the faster you can action it, the faster you get it. And yeah, I'm very proud of that whole team, I think. And look, I don't want to. Just, it's not all rosy like. We had plenty of folks who didn't jump for ships and plenty of days where we were looking at many walks and we had to, you know, get together as a team and figure out. I mean, I'm the worst bartender the Ameswell's ever had. I can tell you right now I there's a- but you did it.

Josiah: 9:48

But you did it and I think I think that's actually an important piece to to call out because you were leading not just from your office but from the front lines and when there was a need you stood up and we're the bartender on multiple occasions.

Lauren: 10:01

There's a very terrible Yelp review about me. You can go find if you're so inclined, but I think like it comes down to sort of empathy, and that was one of our core values. I think, like if you don't understand what it requires to be a bartender and you don't understand what it requires to clean a room and like lift a mattress and wheel a cart on a very high pile carpet, and like how on earth are you supposed to tell people how to do those things if you don't know how, how they feel or what they are? And and, believe me, there's a reason like I am the worst. I'm telling you, I'm so bad at all of those things, but I know how hard they are, and so did every single one of our managers. This is not something that I did alone. Every single one of our players wore multiple hats, jumped in, stayed late, and I think that's that was the key to retention, just as much as anything else.