Travelodge CPO: Help managers ‘build the muscle to lead’

March 2020 felt like doomsday for the hospitality sector.

As governments across Europe introduced lockdowns and restrictions, hotel giant Travelodge was forced to close the vast majority of its locations across the UK, Ireland and Spain.

It saw virtually no trading during the first few months of the pandemic, and faced adverse trading conditions throughout the rest of the year.

Its profit dropped from £129 million in 2019 to a significant loss of £74 million in 2020. Despite continuing restrictions, in Travelodge’s largest market, the UK, specifically, 2021 saw a return to profit – £81 million – the hospitality giant was outperforming the market.

In an exclusive interview with UNLEASH, chief people officer Hannah Thomson shares that although the pandemic “clearly” did affect Travelodge, “we are immensely proud of our record of protecting jobs”.

The UK government’s furlough scheme was essential here, and it meant that the hospitality giant was able to keep redundancies “absolutely minimal”.

She believes that the company, and its employees, are “back in our stride” – this is confirmed by the financials. 2022 was a booming year for Travelodge with a record high profit of £213 million – 2019 figures of £129 million had been the previous record.

COVID-19 and burnout at Travelodge

For Thomson, the pandemic did not fundamentally change Travelodge’s people strategy.

The European hotel giant remained focused on creating a diverse and inclusive workplace – its mantra is for people to “be their true self and belong” – as well as providing meaningful, decent work to people by being “a place where people can earn more if they work more”.

People can work the hours that work best for them, as well as learn new skills and grow in their careers.

However, Thomson shares that COVID-19 did shine a light on the need for the company to adapt, and for wellbeing to be at heart of day-to-day life for employees.

Dan Curtis, head of talent at Travelodge, adds that he was very concerned about burnout, and how many people were working extremely hard and, unfortunately, doing so in an unsustainable way.

This was coming out to play in Travelodge’s engagement surveys – a lot of employees were sharing that their manager cared about their wellbeing, but the reality was that “managers were taking it all on themselves”, and failing to look after themselves in the process, Curtis tells UNLEASH.

“We just recognize, post-pandemic, the need to help our leaders build the muscle that they…need to lead their teams within that post COVID-19 environment,” continues Thomson.

For Travelodge, wellbeing and development go hand in hand, and they are not add-ons, or “a nice to have”, as the HR team may have seen them a few years ago.

Credit: Travelodge.

Coaching as the solution

As part of this aim to empower and upskill managers to “have deeper conversations around development and personal wellbeing” with their teams, Travelodge decided to invest in BetterUp and its coaching platform.

Curtis explains that Travelodge had been in discussions with BetterUp pre-COVID-19, the program was implemented in July 2022.

The key reasons why the hotel giant decided BetterUp was the right fit was threefold: value for money, something that was scalable, and a program that was personalized and “about the whole person, not just you at work”.

Travelodge did not want to do something that was only “for a small group of the leadership team” – they wanted it to be scalable for the whole business.

Using its IdentifyAI tool, BetterUp helps Travelodge to “identify the right people at the right time who would benefit from coaching”, explains Curtis. “But everybody at some point will have the opportunity to take part; it’s just a question of what the order is.”

Although there wasn’t much awareness of coaching pre-BetterUp (and particularly the difference between coaching, mentoring and counseling), 85% of leaders in Travelodge have received coaching through BetterUp.

The biggest piece of work for Travelodge’s HR team has been building that awareness and getting senior sponsorship for the program.

“It was about people knowing that the message from above was ‘it’s important, you need to make this time’,” notes Curtis. As a result of coaching, leaders have worked on their time management, and improved by 45% across the board.

The wellbeing work is not over

The main successes for the Travelodge HR team have been the “stories” – people are being much keener “to talk openly” about their wellbeing within other meetings, they share “‘I’m speaking to my coach about that’”.

This was a huge culture change – “it’s quite different [to before],” notes Curtis.

The incredible uptake of the BetterUp platform to date – leaders are now asking for coaching, rather than having to cajoled by the HR team – is a real success for Thomson.

She believes that “you’ve got to make sure you get enough traction with it so that people are pulling faster than you can provide it, as opposed to being in a position constantly to push”, notes Thomson. “That’s exactly what we did here.”

For her, this ties into Travelodge’s straightforward, practical attitude to HR in general.

“If you spoke to somebody at Travelodge, they won’t necessarily talk about [diversity] or a high performance culture, but they would definitely talk about what they’ve been learning and how everybody belongs at Travelodge.”

Travelodge’s initial one year partnership with BetterUp has now come to an end, and it has moved to extend.

Curtis is generally clear that this refocus on wellbeing, and the partnership with BetterUp, are long-term focuses, they are not just a reaction to the pandemic.

“Wellbeing is not just important now – it is always going to be important.”

Travelodge has been leveraging the data and analysis side of BetterUp’s platform – and in a transparent way.

The HR team shared with the rest of the company that “Yes, we are going to collect data, yes, we’re going to analyze the data” but “we’re not going to understand what everyone worked on with the coach”.

Instead, Travelodge would have aggregate views of the cohorts’ wellbeing assessments, and how these changed and improved over time as they went through coaching, as well as the employer to benchmark its success against competitors globally.

This insight is invaluable when the HR team is looking at new development programs to implement in the future.

Alongside the BetterUp partnership, Travelodge has been through a digital learning transformation – it has a new learning management system, Sponge Learning. The idea here is to link up all the development programs across the entire employee life cycle.

Curtis is excited to see what the next few years will hold for wellbeing and development at Travelodge – “the exciting bit will be in 2027 and 2028 – we will see the full value.”