Co-creating a people-centric
service culture for Novotel
worldwide – to slow talent
attrition, drive brand consistency
& boost customer love
Impact in a nutshell
Boosting team member engagement, motivation and ownership to deliver service the Novotel way across 600+ hotels worldwide
Equipping Novotel to drive service consistency more effectively through the co-creation of a set of simple, brand-led service behaviours that translate across roles, languages and regions
Helping Novotel take a fresh, industry-leading approach to activating service culture through global training academies, culture champions, and a truly people-led, behavioural-science backed change programme
Context
After a turbulent period post-covid, the hotel and hospitality sector continues to face significant challenges. Geopolitical shifts, economic pressures, the rise of AI, and changes in the way people are travelling are reshaping the industry and the expectations of customer service.
With an average of 38.7% talent attrition, the hospitality sector has the highest staff turnover of any industry – meaning brand and people leaders are urgently looking for new approaches to keep staff engagement, retention and customer experience standards high.
Challenge
It was a similar set of challenges that Novotel, Accor’s midscale hotel brand, shared with Kin&Co in 2023. With an increasing level of competition in the midscale segment, and with both franchised and managed operations worldwide, Novotel needed to slow the turnover of frontline staff and drive more consistent levels of brand experience across its 600 hotels. As a General Manager in London noted, service consistency directly affects online reviews and the Reputation Performance Score (RPS) of hotels, especially in highly competitive markets.
Novotel knew that happy, motivated and loyal teams are at the heart of why many guests will make a return visit, and that the engagement and performance of their 40,000 “Heartists” (what Accor calls their team members) is vital to driving a consistent brand standard.
Through our experience at Kin&Co, we know that the dynamics of working in hospitality are unique. Working in a hotel can be joyful, varied, and fun; and yet it can also be hard.
Someone working in housekeeping may be working two jobs, may have a new team member to bring-up-to-speed, and have a customer complaint to deal with every few minutes. They can’t rely on process or support, line management practices or performance development in the way that a typical office worker might. It’s not easy to implement more structured approaches to engagement and team performance within a hotel, and even harder to have the time for them.
The reality is that team members rely on each other for support; creating a strong sense of belonging amongst employees and enhancing how the customer feels when they stay. Indeed, throughout our work with Novotel we were struck by the huge pride, passion and care shown by Heartists for their work and for each other.
These dynamics mean that Novotel, like many service-oriented brands, had a particularly powerful and human-centred opportunity to build a service culture in a new and different way – putting people, creativity, inclusion, playfulness and behavioural science front and centre.
Vision for impact
Together with Novotel, we wanted to set a new standard for how world-leading service cultures are built, activated and managed.
We wanted to help Novotel to converge the worlds of brand, service and culture, take a deeply democratic, playful and inclusive approach to team engagement and cultural change, and put the power of behavioural science in the hands of their learning academies and hotel teams worldwide.
We wanted to challenge some of the negative perceptions of working in mid-market hospitality and genuinely build brand love, employee pride and staff retention through the work, not just as a result of it. And ultimately, we set out to measure the impact of the culture work based on guest satisfaction, RPS and business performance for Novotel in the long term.
Approach
To maximise impact and genuinely drive lasting shifts in behaviour, we underpinned everything in behavioural science.
We sparked change through an international Culture Builder Network of over 50 Novotel employees globally, who conducted 178 interviews and gained 463 survey responses, and ultimately championed the development of the culture we were building. Drawing on behavioural theories such as the network effect and modelling theory, the experiences we designed were intentionally exciting, connecting, and action-oriented, creating change in the group – an impressive 97% were enthusiastic and felt personally accountable for the success of Novotel’s new service culture, with 94% feeling genuinely heard through the journey.
The process is as important as the output so we ensured that the programme itself role modelled the kind of culture Novotel wanted to create in every hotel.
We built a groundswell through the process, leveraging technology with an AI-enabled co-creation platform to facilitate large-scale, global sessions. This allowed employees to share ideas and actively shape the evolving service culture together, from Paris and Sao Paolo, to London and Melbourne. As a result, 86% of the participants felt their views were genuinely valued, building connection to the emerging culture.
We unlocked the creativity and commitment of General Managers, which was critical for setting the tone culturally in hotels, ensuring connection to the brand and strategic objectives, whilst modelling the behaviours – and we reached over 50% of Novotel GMs. We got their buy-in through genuine co-creation to make this valuable at a hotel level.
We knew that aligning the culture with the brand positioning was key to making it memorable, impactful and distinctive for Novotel’s teams.
We worked closely with brand leadership to bring the voice of the customer to life in the culture programme, run customer focus groups, immerse in the strategic positioning and direction for the brand, and understand the core DNA of the Novotel customer value proposition.
We linked the new service behaviours to the core of the Novotel brand. We developed a simple and memorable service culture which could be easily applied and translated across different cultures and contexts, deeply connected to Novotel’s brand positioning. We focused on a few critical service behaviours that would drive the shifts Novotel needed.
“Our behaviours are in a common language, they are accessible for all staff to understand” – Matt Brett, General Manager, Novotel
Impact moments
Shifting the system
Experiences can change behaviour. We worked with Academy leadership globally to evolve Accor’s approach to service culture training by introducing a face-to-face training module alongside their digital modules. This included designing activities fit for 40,000 team members, and allowed for a behavioural-science led embedding approach, nudging behaviour through champions activity and daily operations.
It required buy-in from the Accor’s internal training academy, and culminated in a “training transfer” experience hosted in Paris, led by the Global CCO and CHRO, transferring ownership of the culture rollout to the regional academy leads, and building momentum for the strategic impact the teams could have.
Keeping it grounded
Facing the reality of hospitality, our first training pilot at Novotel Brugge was a “new opening”, a hotel a week away from opening its doors. With construction and snagging still underway and a group of team members from diverse backgrounds and language abilities, we pivoted to focus more on the energetic, connecting, and exciting activities – rooted in the service behaviours of the brand.
By day’s end, the entire group were able to remember the Service Promise and were fully engaged with the brand service culture concept. The entire operations team embraced this rare opportunity to spend quality time with colleagues in a fun, otherworldly experience that broke from their daily routine while remaining connected to their hotel work.
50% of General Managers actively participated in the co-creation process.
86% of employees felt their views on the direction of Novotel’s service culture were genuinely heard and valued.
97% of Culture Builders said they felt a strong sense of personal accountability for the successful implementation of the new service culture.
Forward-looking summary
Novotel’s new service culture provides simple yet powerful expectations for Novotel Heartists for how they deliver for customers, driving quality, consistency, and brand differentiation.
Looking ahead, this transformation is set to deliver significant impact for Novotel. The programme has been received enthusiastically and Novotel’s new service culture is perfectly poised to drive engagement and help team members enhance the experience for the guests.
The future for people in hospitality is bright!
Our work speaks volumes