Lizz Chambers, Vice President of Team Member Engagement at Newport Hospitality Group sat down with us to share her view on how an employee engagement platform has helped to maintain a connection with all her employees. Here’s what she had to say.
Q1. Tell us about Newport Hospitality Group and your role at NHG.
Hi, my name is Liz Chambers and my title is vice president of team member engagement and I work for it Newport Hospitality Group. We’ve been around for 30 years this year and we have approximately 50 hotels mostly up and down the east coast but we do have a couple now west of the Mississippi. We are really expanding very quickly.
Q2. What engagement issues was NHG facing?
What we were finding is that with 50 hotels when you’re all spread out they really don’t feel like much of a team and they’re also separate from each other and we were looking for something to bring everyone closer together where I could put training, documents and a lot of things in one place and connect everyone so they felt more like a team and I researched a lot of different platforms and HubEngage just seemed to answer all of it.
Q3. What was one of the major benefits of using an employee communications app?
One of the things that I really love about it is that we all have our own locations there so anyone from, say, if they’re working in New York and they were thinking about going to Florida and want to connect with Florida they just have to go on the app and go to the locations and they can look at any of our hotels so instead of putting out a paper document they’re all right there in the same place their phone numbers there they can click on them and they can call another auditor to get advice and it’s all right there at their fingertips so that’s been wonderful.
Q4. How did the internal social feed benefit your organization and its employees?
They love the social feed it’s like having their own Facebook page they’ve posted wonderful pictures of their property, right now there is a food drive going on and they’re posting pictures of the food drive, they’ve posted videos of their monthly luncheons and it really shows everyone who is just joining our company it shows them the culture of our company that we are so inclusive and by having this at their fingertips, it just, I don’t know it’s kind of a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Q5. How have you used the platform to make information more accessible to your employees?
Well, the documents so when they would have to either go to a thumb drive or you know to call the corporate office to try to find it all they do now is just go to the Mikey app you have a global search, they print part of the name whether they want to position description or evaluation or any kind of type of payroll document we have everything on Mikey.
Q7. Why did you decide to work with HubEngage?
We used to use survey monkey and it would take us forever to put it in our format but HubEngage has worked with us and we were able to get the format done and now we can get the surveys are almost in real-time I mean it’s just so quick and it has really been a game-changer for us.
Q8. How has your experience been working with HubEngage so far?
Of all the applications that we have here at our corporate office, I have never had such a response as I have from HubEngage and I’m not just any I’m not just saying that because I am on this video I mean when I ask a question I get an answer it’s within minutes a lot of the times and even after hours when I was putting the app together and I am older and to think that I would ever be a part of creating an app and all of you were there and you were there for me you lead me through the process any time I have a question now if I email it’s just right back at me and I’ve never had such support. I will tell anybody that please please please if you invest in a company it’s this one.
Learn more about how to boost employee engagement and productivity for the hospitality industry here.
