"Best Employer": The Secrets Behind Our Winning Strategy for People-First Culture - Dina Belon & Mike Hirschler, Staypineapple Hotels

Josiah: Today we continue our series with Staypineapple Hotels, diving deep into the heart of what makes this company stand out: their people-focused culture. When we began our series on Monday, I shared how one of the reasons I'm profiling Staypineapple this week is their commitment to the people on their teams. It's earned them recognition from the Seattle Times as the best place to work in the Pacific Northwest, among other accolades. In this episode, we hear from Dina Belon, Staypineapple's president, and Mike Hirschler, the company's chief growth officer, who previously held the company's chief people officer role. You'll learn about this company's unique approach to people and culture, including what they call their frontline staff and how this reflects their company values, the surprise and delight program that gives their team the freedom to go above and beyond for guests, how and why they encourage authenticity among team members, and how they stay connected with frontline staff even when working in corporate leadership roles. I really appreciated the story Mike shared at the end about this. So keep listening and learn how Staypineapple's commitment to their people translates into exceptional guest experiences and business success. 

Dina: When I call our team members at the hotels our hoteliers, everybody in the industry calls the frontline, frontline, or team members or staff, and all the people higher up in the company are hoteliers. I encourage people to flip that around because it's not really true. The hoteliers are the people standing at the front desk daily. Those are hoteliers. So, my diatribe. I have a literal, real example of what we call surprise and delight. From our hotel here in Seattle, Maxwell, Bonnie, who's one of our everything people, is working at the front desk one evening, and somebody calls in a panic. Their rental car's broken down and can't, it doesn't know when the tow truck's going to get there and when they're going to get a new car and they just want to make sure that their room isn't going to be given. So Bonnie assures her that your room will be available when you get here, no matter what time you get here. And then he starts talking to the guest, and it's like, what's going on? Tell me, you know, tell me what's happening. And she was really distraught. She's got a couple of kids with her. She's sitting in a place she doesn't know. She doesn't know if it's safe.

Josiah: Minds racing, there's fear.

Dina: Yeah, you've got all this concern. Bonnie just talked with her for a little bit, and they hung up. Through the conversation, the guests gave her quite a bit of information. And so this is what we encourage our teams to do really listen and then use that information to take action. So Bonnie found the local pizza place close to where the guest was at. They were in a mall parking lot and ordered pizza and dessert and drinks for the whole family, and gave the delivery driver very clear instructions on what the car was and where it was located in the mall parking lot so that he could bind them and had that delivered to them because they were hungry and didn't know when they were going to get to eat and she wanted to take care of them. That goes back to that if you really teach people the idea, the why, they know to do that. We didn't have to tell Bonnie to do that in that kind of circumstance. Bonnie knew to do that because she wanted to care for people. She wants people to be happy.

Josiah: I love that story. Thank you for sharing it. I want to hear your perspective. As somebody who's running this company, what have you done structurally, culturally, you can go whatever direction you want with this, but what have you done as the leader here to make this possible?

Dina: Yeah, it's actually a pretty simple sequence of events. First, we recruit the right people. So, we don't do in-depth task or skill assessments during a recruiting process. We recruit people for culture fit and emotional intelligence. We talk about emotional intelligence a lot inside of our company. If you have emotional intelligence, you can critically think through many circumstances and figure out the right decision on your own. You don't need a manager to tell you what to do. So we hire the right people. Bonnie was the right kind of person.

Josiah: It seems hard to do. Is it in an interview, or how do you pick it up?

Dina: I mentioned… Yeah, we have predetermined questions that really help us dig into the person's desire and like what is their core belief. If their core belief as a human being aligns with our mission, then we nailed it. Now we don't nail it every time, but we get a lot of it right. And if you start there, then retention is much easier because you've started aligned. Then, we encourage our team members to be authentic. Everybody says that. How do you do it? We do it every in every way, not in a lot of ways, but literally in every way. I'll give you a few examples. Our front office team doesn't have uniforms. We encourage them to wear their own clothes to work because that's who they are. Putting them in a black polo shirt with our logo on it is the antithesis of authenticity, right? We encourage people to use the pronoun that is appropriate to them, that they want to use. We encourage people to be friends at work. That's a crazy idea. We do that here at the corporate office. We do that in the field. We feel like it's really important for people to have friends and that sense of belonging at work.

Josiah: And just on this point, you have an internal Facebook group, as I understand it, that this is not the place where people become friends. But I guess I am just calling this out as an example of one of the mechanisms that's in place where structurally, You're creating, you're not just saying this, but I was talking to someone else on your team, and you're saying how active it is. It's not corporate just trying to drum up conversation. It's organically active. And for me, spending my whole life or career in media, I've seen a lot of cases where it feels inauthentic because it's a corporate initiative. And this sounds to be very authentic because it started somewhere else.

Dina: Yeah, we don't do anything with it. It's 100% the team. It's all fed by the teams; whether it's team members here in the corporate office or team members in the field, it's their space. It's not ours. We manage it just so that nothing inappropriate ends up on it, but that's it. That's literally it. We want people to put on there what they're thinking about, what they're talking about, what's interesting to them. One of the other really cool things we do is ask our team members what they're passionate about, what they're excited about, what's interesting to them in their town, and that's how we build our curated services and curated programs for guests. That's interesting, is it? Do you have an example? Yeah, so we have a team member right now at one of our hotels that is really into cycling, and so he wrote our whole map for all the great cycling locations. We've got another one that her uncle owns a fishing boat here in Seattle and knows all the hot spot fishing locations that locals only know about. And so we created a curated program around going to those locations. So it's really about the team members feeling involved and being able to create these things as much as it is about creating really cool curated programs for guests to interact with. It's as important to the team members as it is the guests, I think is the point.

Josiah: What you're describing there has so many benefits, exactly what you just said there. It helps the guests, but it helps the team. And every single owner I talk to is asking the brands they work with, the management companies they work with, what are you doing to help me retain people that will help me provide a sort of experience that I want so that the business thrives, right? And so you're getting at kind of structural issues of how specifically that you do that. And it creates a differentiated advantage. I wonder if we go back to the story of Bonnie just for a moment because I'm thinking of her talking to this person who got stranded and the car's broken down. Did she have a little bit of leeway? It sounds like she ordered a pizza, so there's a little bit of leeway to delight the guest. She was empowered, is what I took away from your story.

Dina: Our Surprise and Delight program is about team member empowerment. It's not a guest program, it's team member empowerment program. Team members, there's no budget, first of all. Surprise and Delight is not a budget line item on our P&L. And team members are empowered to surprise and delight in any way they see fit. And we've never had a team member spend too much money. As the first question everybody asks me is, oh my God, have you ever had somebody do something crazy? No.

Josiah: You have a lot of hotels and a lot of people working for you. So if something crazy was going to happen, it probably would have happened already.

Dina: Yeah, because people are smart. They know. We don't need to give them a budget. They understand the reasonable parameters. Again, critical thinking. We encourage our employees to use their own brains to know the right thing to do. We say that a lot. Do the right thing. If you do the right thing, You won't be wrong. You'll find the right path to make the guest happy.

Josiah: Amazing. And so I love that you shared the story of Bonnie. Is it just something that you and I have talked about, as well as all the people who are watching and listening to this? Or did that story somehow get shared in other contexts to help reinforce the culture and how you operate here?

Dina: It has been shared. Yeah. In fact, we have a Surprise and Delight quarterly award for the best Surprise and Delight for the quarter. And it is up for the award. And it's been shared actually at our most senior leadership level. I also shared the story with Michelle.

Josiah: So it's amazing from the founder to the senior leadership to the staff. To me, this is important. It's interesting because I think for everybody watching and listening to this, this is how you build culture. It's creating space. It's showing here's our North Star. Here's the why. But it's also, I think there's, I don't know, like the daily hygiene or whatever you want to call it. It needs to be reinforced because I feel like it can kind of expire if it's not at the top of my mind. So I think that's where storytelling is so important.

Dina: It is. Storytelling is essential. You cannot get the point across without giving an example and telling a story around it. We were just talking about something recently, and we had all of the points and all the things were included. And I went, I asked our VP of people and culture, I was like, where's the storyline? I don't, I, you got it all covered. But you need a storyline. You need to connect all of the dots. And it was really around finding the connection between team members and their experience and the value to our owners. And that doesn't seem like a direct point, but it is. And you intimated that in your question. Really that innkeeper mentality, that friend style service that is so important to us, starts with recruiting and retention, and training with our team members, that's how we get that innkeeper mentality. And by doing all of these things with our teams, we deliver value to our owners because we increase top-line revenue because people come back. And the second time you come and visit me, I have less acquisition cost, right? So we save money, we reduce expenses, And we increase revenue through innkeeper mentality and front-style service. And we only do that through all the things we do with our teams, creating authenticity, creating a space they want to work, making sure it's fun. Last time I checked, we're not brain surgeons. If you are not having fun in the hospitality industry, you are doing it wrong.

Josiah: It creates this world where people working here are going to refer talented people into the organization. So it's this virtuous cycle. Everything you've described is a virtuous cycle. It's what I love about the business of hospitality because it feels like by doing the right thing, doing the fun thing, you're creating benefits that ripple on to economic benefits, right? And I think that's intensely interesting to me. You don't stop with innovating. I feel like there's, I've been talking with a few folks over the past couple of days. I want our stuff recorded to be timeless, but markets have been up and down and crazy. And, you know, obviously in the past five years have just been crazy. So volatility is nothing new here, but I'm not hearing somebody who's just sitting around on their hands waiting for perfect conditions, whether it's technology, whether it's culture, Every day you're moving forward, you're ready, and wherever the market goes, whatever happens, you're going to be ready for it to capture what's there and to stand out and outperform.

Dina: Oh, thank you. That is the core. I'm glad that that's coming across, right? That is the core of who we are. We sit in this room and regularly have meetings and just have big ideas. Quarterly, we have a big ideas meeting where we just come in and we just throw stuff up on the wall and what is the new thing? What can we think about? And often, it's iteration in that meeting that actually comes up with a big idea, right? Somebody says something, and it's probably a bad idea, but somebody says something else off of that idea that becomes the thing that we want to do.

Josiah: What's something that sounded crazy initially, and then you've iterated on it, and that was a part of what you do here?

Dina: Oh, that's a great question. One of my favorite failures was big ass cakes and kick-ass cocktails.

Josiah: Great name.

Dina: What could go wrong? Great name. We had it plastered on posters all over the hotel. And it was really a program that our food and beverage operation is very bar forward. And we're in locations that generally have great restaurants in the area and are very close to big venues. And so often, we are the after-party location. And so that was kind of the idea, right? Come and have a cocktail with us and a big ass piece of cake. Because who doesn't love a big ass piece of cake? Sounds fun. Right? Sounds great. And someday, we'll be able to get back and roll that out. But it ended up being a terrible idea because we tried to find a bakery that would make these cakes and then ship them all over the country, and it was a disaster. It didn't work. But the idea is still there. There's still a there there about it. And we will find the right way to get back to that idea and utilize it, even when something fails and it doesn't work. We often find a good idea out of it.

Josiah: All right, now I want to turn the mic over to Mike, who has led people teams in leadership roles across a variety of great hospitality companies and was the chief people officer at Stay Pineapple before his current role as chief growth officer. Here's Mike.

Mike: What's the word we always hear when it comes to what matters most in an organization? It's always culture, right? Culture, culture, culture. And everybody's trying to find the magic pill to swallow to create the most amazing culture. And any book you read on leadership or organizational structure says that culture takes forever to create. And I love, and it's on us, we get to have our favorite quote on our website, and so I'm going to misquote Warren Buffett, but it's that basically trust is built over a period of years, but it can be gone in an instant. And culture is very much that way, right? When we talk about culture, there are good cultures and bad cultures, but nobody wants a bad culture. They all want the best culture. So we're going to use that as our baseline, right? And so I think about large-scale organizations and this desire to create culture. But I come back to what I said earlier. It all starts at the top. You have to have a team of executives that there's no way you can possibly be on the ground every day, but at least is in touch with what is happening on the ground every day to remember who it is that is driving the organization. And we get, there's the ivory tower that we all hear about, and it's so natural for that to become the case, where because I'm in an office building, and when I go on site to a hotel, because of my title, I get the royal treatment. I just think I'm a guest, not an employee of the organization, is a complete breakdown in understanding that in our company, 85% of the employee population does not work in this building. And because we are centralized, we do have a higher administrative population. So it would be, you know, in another organization, it'd probably be 90/10. We are serving those people. We are strictly here to support the people in the field who are engaging with our guests every single day.

Josiah: What do you find useful in staying in touch with that? Cause I feel like it's hard when you're working in a centralized office. I don't know if you feel that, but I feel like in general it's hard.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I came from, I spent, you know, more than 20 years at property-level operations. So I think, I don't want to say it's easier for me because, but it is simply because that's where I spent the bulk of my career. The more distance you get from that, the more you have to remind yourself. What I do is I remind everybody here as often as I can that we are here to serve. The hotels are not there to serve us. And I think what you see too often is this need to justify existence at a corporate level. So you see so many things recycled over and over and over again into new programming.

Mike: And I remember from being on property just how it would drive you insane because they're like, you don't have any clue. You don't understand what we're dealing with every single day, right?

Mike: And how this gets in the way of our ability to serve the guest. So that is something that we work really hard to do. I really also, It's about getting into the hotels and it's about talking to our team members. One of the beauties of our organization is that because our hotels are not massive, we're able to. When I go to a hotel, there are instances where we can literally talk to every single team member individually. We just recently did that in one of our properties where the team member engagement score had dropped significantly year over year. And we went in and we sat down and we talked to every single team member to try to find the source of what was going on in that angst. That's powerful. We have the ability to do that. And when you do that, you realize who we're serving. It also completely breaks down all the levels of stratification when our team members get to engage directly with the people that are leading the organization. And you know, again, the larger you get, the more difficult that is, but it's important to remember how powerful that is and how much that matters to our line-level team members. When they can hear from us directly and see that the way we behave is consistent with the messaging that we deliver, then, right, that's culture.

Josiah: I love this example you shared of going on site where scores had dropped. And I want to just bring this to life. Do you recall some things that came out of those conversations?

Mike: Yeah, what was really fun. So this was earlier this year before I transitioned into my new role. So I went on-site with the people in culture manager who's, whose a property that was dedicated. And you know, we started. We got a room, and he and I sat in the room together. And what I quickly realized, probably within the second conversation, is a majority of the team members on that property, their first language is Spanish. I don't know a word of Spanish. And he's a fluent Spanish speaker. And so I'm literally just sitting there watching this conversation take place. And I quickly realized I was a detractor to the conversation because I would ask a question. He'd translate it. They'd respond. He'd translate it back to me. Finally, I just said, Al, You're going to do a far better job if I remove myself from the situation, right? I'm dying to hear it for myself. But it was for them to be able to, without hindrance and without delay, just be able to share their perspective with somebody who looked like them, speaks the language they do. It just broke down the barriers. So he was able to get the truth. It requires you to set your ego aside, though. Absolutely.

Josiah: And I think that's where, I mean, just to connect threads of what you've shared earlier, if you think about you're here to empower people, it's one thing to say that, but I think it shows up in moments in meetings. It shows up when you have a hard challenge that needs to be solved. And the traditional playbook of top executives being involved in everything, you might have to improvise throughout the playbook and think on your feet.

Mike: I think I know it's exactly right. You have to sit there and say okay, right? We try to script everything we script everything in life, and you know, this is a lesson that I remember and you know was was I had a fantastic employment lawyer that I worked with in Seattle in my prior company and And what I loved about working with him was I didn't feel like, I said to him, I said, John, I said, I really like working with you. How could you sum it up in one sentence? And he said, well, we realize the operational reality of a hotel in our firm. So our job is not to mitigate your risk a hundred percent, which is what many lawyers do. Our job is to mitigate your risk by 85%. You're never going to be able to mitigate that last 15% and be able to actually function.

Josiah: Because that 15% takes an insane amount of time.

Mike: And that's where you go from the one-pager to it just keeps going and going and going because we're always trying to CYA, we're always trying to protect and it breaks down relationships, whether it be with your owners, whether it be with your team members, whether it be with your guests. And so you have to know when you need to, you know, it's the old, no one to hold them, no one to fold them. And in a case like that, it was, yeah, I wanted to be, I wanted to hear this for myself. But my God, I wouldn't have gotten the information we needed. And just my title alone was a hindrance to comfort in being able to speak their truth, right? And get what we needed to be able to start to make some adjustments. Now, we haven't done another team member engagement survey, so we don't know the results of that yet, but hopefully, we'll see a change.

Josiah: It's incredible.

Mike: You asked the question, how do you define the culture of your organization? And I looked at that as how do you define the culture of any organization? And culture is a vibe. That's what it is. You can't write culture into a standard operating procedure. You can't demand it, right? It is truly a vibe. And it is. It spans the entirety of the organization. And so when I think about us, we really try to ensure that fun is what drives that. And you also had a note about our Facebook group, our team member's Facebook group, and how there are 20 posts approximately per week, and yet nothing comes from the organization.

Josiah: Which is usually the other way around.

Mike: It's totally the other way around. If we were to insert ourselves into the conversation, it would impact the authenticity and the organic-ness that exists. ...the organic nature of that group. And, you know, in my role as the head of people in culture early on, I was on that, you know, a hundred percent risk mitigation and had heart palpitations over that Facebook group. And I, was told on no uncertain terms, are we taking that away? Because it matters to people. It also gives them a sense of community that engenders pride in what they do for our guests, for one another, and for their connection to the brand. And it's a hands-off environment that allows them to be connected together in a social environment. If we've got something to say, we've got a specific email letterhead that says from the desk of the ELT, we can put an announcement out on our payroll system that everybody has mobile access to and notifications. There are ways for us to do that and to engage with our team members in an official capacity. Let them have their space. And that is a true sign of culture, vibe, all of those things.