Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Simplicity is incredibly complex. When you peek behind the curtain to the employee, all they see is a clean screen with the shifts that they're eligible to pick up based upon their jobs that they're trained in. If a shift is cut automagically, now they can pick up another shift while still ensuring that there's guardrails and that they're not, you know, electing themselves into a situation where they're working 60 hours a week.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Welcome to a new episode of the what Works podcast series. You just heard from Conrad Riddle, vice president of HR shared services at Ambridge Hospitality, the largest third party hotel operator in the world based in the United States. In today's episode, Kathy and senior vice president of research and global industry analyst at the Josh Burson company sits down with Conrad to explore how Ambridge is transforming workforce management. They discuss the implementation of UKG workforce management, how a centralized app is helping Aimbridge adapt to an uberized workforce, and how technology is connecting hotel locations while giving employees more flexibility.
Let's jump into the episode.
[00:01:13] Speaker C: Conrad, thanks so much for joining us on the what Works podcast.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Thank you for having me, Kathy.
[00:01:18] Speaker C: We're really looking forward to this conversation. As we get started, Conrad, tell us a little bit about yourself, your role, and then also your company.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: Yeah, my title is vice president of HR shared services, which doesn't always mean something to everyone, but really what that means is that all things HR technology and centralized HR administration come in under, under my team, which I think is a really exciting place to be today, where there's just a ton of new innovation, new solutions to kind of age old problems in the HR space. I actually come from a total rewards background, and total rewards is kind of half HR and half systems. And I've been drawn into the system side and I think I'm here to stay.
[00:02:07] Speaker C: Tell us a little bit more about who the company is and what problem you were trying to solve as you got started with UKG workforce management.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: Yeah, so Aimbridge is a third party hotel manager, and I would venture that most people listening have stayed with us before, but you probably didn't know it. So what I didn't know before I got into the hospitality industry was that increasingly Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and all the different brand names that you see on the buildings do not operate hotels. They're much more in the franchise business. And usually who owns those hotels are investment vehicles. So your 401K, if you see that real estate option, that likely has a holding in a hotel and your 401K plan is not interested in the actual day to day of operating a hotel. So they hire a company like a bridge, and we run the building like it's our own, even though we don't own it. So we hire the people, we set the rates, we set up relationships with all the vendors, and that's what Aimbridge does. We operate more hotels in the US.
We're actually the largest third party operator of hotels in the world, and we're the largest third party operator in the United States as well. Wow.
[00:03:25] Speaker C: How many hotels do you have? And how many employees do you have as well?
[00:03:29] Speaker A: Yeah, we're pushing about 1100 locations right now and about 45,000 employees in the United States.
[00:03:36] Speaker C: Wow. Wow. That's massive.
Huge. And hospitality, obviously, is a very difficult business and a very fast changing business. And how did all of this get started? Tell us a little bit more on why you were embarking on this journey.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: So a few years ago, after we're dusting ourselves off post Covid and really thinking about kind of what's next, my Chro challenged her leadership team.
You look out at the landscape and you see more and more jobs going the way of the Uber model, where, you know, you don't have to apply to a formal job and agree to a weekly schedule on an ongoing basis. You can instead get signed up and you set the days you want to drive, and you decide that, or you go to Amazon and decide which days you want to deliver packages. So that's on one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum is where we were at that time. We're there. Hospitality, very old business model, things that have been entrenched and done a certain way for decades and decades. And her push to us was, how do we compete with this uberized workforce? How do we give some power back to employees that set us down the path of where we got to today with utilizing UKG workforce management.
[00:05:03] Speaker C: Wow. So uberizing the workforce, giving more flexibility to jobs and to people, and helping people kind of create their own schedule and work at their own time and.
Sounds fascinating. And, of course, challenging. Right. For an industry that's as old and as ingrained, I think, in a lot of ways, as hospitality. How did you get started? What did you do first? How did you first come to the conclusion, even to that you needed a tool for that? Tell us more about that. Kind of the origin story.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, interestingly enough, it was the UKG merger, and we were longtime ultimate software customers. And when UKG ultimate and Chronos merged together, then all of a sudden, we had access to a Kronos tool. And we knew Chronos by name is kind of some of the best in class workforce management tools that are out there. So we became very interested in making a change.
Coincidentally, at the same time, we were with a timekeeper that ultimate software had that they had declared was going to be phased out over the coming years. So it was time for a change anyway, and we saw an opportunity moving to UKG workforce management to try and coordinate some of these different activities between properties.
Wow.
[00:06:25] Speaker C: So how does it work? How does the UKG workforce management work? Tell me a little bit about how it works from an employee perspective, maybe from a manager perspective as well.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So from an employee's perspective, what we now have and did not have before is a centralized app where the employee can go to one place and see their time, cardinal, see their schedule of what's upcoming, and then also has self service options to be able to manage their schedule. So if I'm an employee and I've been scheduled on Thursday, but I now have a personal conflict and I can't work Thursday at all, I can put that shift up and hope that another member of my team claims it, or maybe I have the morning shift and I'm no longer can work the morning, but I would still like to not lose those hours in that paycheck. So I'm going to try and trade with somebody who's working the evening shift, and I can see who has those evening shifts and propose a shift trait to that employee all through the app. So whereas before, managers were kind of the center point of all of these requests, and it had to go through them so that they could go manually update a schedule, which was probably a piece of paper on the wall. Now, employees can self serve all of these requests. They go under the manager's nose for approval, not unlike you might be used to with a PTO request.
And then it automatically updates the schedule in all places for everyone to see, what the manager sees besides those approvals coming across their desk, is they see a difference between the amount of labor they might need and the amount of labor that they have scheduled on the schedule.
[00:08:04] Speaker C: That's a big deal, I think, in hospitality, as far as I understand, because usually it's like one property is kind of the whole universe, right? It's almost like its own company, but now you get the power of having all these properties and all these employees working together.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: Yeah, hospitality historically has been very siloed. You know, we talk about general managers at a hotel that they're the CEO of their own small business there.
[00:08:31] Speaker C: How has it been for employees to embrace that? Have they liked it? How easy is it for them to. What's the feedback?
[00:08:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it's been good. I think the key here is that everything for them is in one place. So you might get an employee to log into the app for the first time because they want to put in a vacation request, or they realize that it's easier for them to look at their schedule at home than have to drive into the building and take a picture of a piece of paper on the wall. But then once they're logged into the workforce management app with UKGA, everything is there. Their time cards there, their PTO balances are there, their schedule is there.
Their ability to request changes to all of those things is all there in one place for them.
[00:09:18] Speaker C: And, I mean, the power of having everything in one place is key. I think the other thing that's probably also key is how easy it is. So they don't need to understand what they're eligible for or where they could apply to a shift or how they could swap it because it's all automated.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: That's totally right. I have a saying that I think applies to many different scenarios, that simplicity is incredibly complex when you peek behind the curtain. So to the employee, all they see is a clean screen with the shifts that they're eligible to pick up based upon their jobs that they're trained in, what, what's nearby. So, for example, your San Diego employees not going to see shifts in LA, because nobody's driving from San Diego to Los Angeles for a shift. But you might go from downtown to Mission Valley, and they would see those shifts that are available to them.
Like you said, if somebody's already up against their 40 hours a week, they're not going to see the ability to pick up extra shifts. But if a shift is cut and they go down to 32 right away, auto magically, now they can pick up another shift, maybe at another location or in another job.
So there's a lot of series of different work rules that are trying to present a really clean, easy to use interface to the employee while still ensuring that there's guardrails and that they're not electing themselves into a situation where they're working 60 hours a week.
[00:10:41] Speaker C: What about the managers? Did it make their life easier? How has it been? Because if they had before, you said before they would stick something scheduled on the wall, it would be all manual. How has it worked for them?
[00:10:53] Speaker A: It certainly simplified their life. There's a small contingent of people that I think were used to the way it was and liked everything flowing through them. But I think the large majority of managers that we don't hear feedback from, which in my world usually means something is working.
It just happens with less time and less effort than it used to. We had to be really thoughtful around what sorts of changes go through and are more of a informational notification to the manager versus which sort of transactions actually require manager approval before they go through and update a time card or update the schedule. But once all that's in place, now the manager just is approving requests.
[00:11:38] Speaker C: So it sounds like such a fascinating, such a good journey. How long did it take you to set it up? What was the timeline for all of this?
[00:11:46] Speaker A: It took us about three months to get the entire organization on the platform, and I would say another six months before it really chilled into place. Right now, we're a little over 18 months in an organization our size. We had a realization with this project that it's just too big to big bang the entire organization all at once. So we broke ourselves into about five different groups, depending upon complexity and different business requirements, and then took us through in different waves, even though it would be simpler to just rip the band aid. At the end of the day, me and my team are only resourced to a certain level and we can't support 1100 properties all at once. Whereas if you save five different waves of 200 properties, that starts to feel. It's still overwhelming actually, to say it out loud, but it feels a little more realistic than 1100 all at once.
[00:12:40] Speaker C: So what's been easy, if anything, on this, and what's been hard easy has.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Been getting the employees to see the value of it. I mentioned earlier that when you hit a certain tipping point on property, then they started showing each other. We would see certain properties where employees had figured out how to use the tool, and then it just took off on its own. What's been hard has been the amount of change that happened all at once. I mentioned it was six months to implement and probably another six months to really gel. It is a massive undertaking now for Aimbridge hospitality. We didn't have a workforce management tool prior to this. We had a timekeeping tool. We had a separate kind of labor standards scheduling tool that only some properties were using. So it was a huge amount of change that we brought into the system all at once. It's been an interesting experience, I bet.
[00:13:39] Speaker C: But you made it work. So congrats to you.
What are some lessons learned that you would share with others who are embarking.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: On this journey, one thing we've had to double back on a few times is where we didn't leave ourselves enough flexibility in the solution, that we built something that was just too rigid. So when managers in the operation would come back to us and say, this is great, can it also do this? We'd say yes, but we need to go rebuild something from the ground up to make it do that. So if I had it to do over again, I wish I had left a little bit more flexibility in some areas so that we could be a little more flexible as we went along.
Another lesson learned I alluded to earlier, is that what managers say associates want isn't always actually what associates want. So making sure you listen to your associate population, of course, managers are a huge and important stakeholder in any technology project, but let them be their voice, and let the associates be their voice however best you can.
[00:14:47] Speaker C: That's a huge lesson for sure on any kind of undertaking, to listen to employees and take their feedback and turn it into and shape what you're building with their feedback and any surprises that you had on what employees actually wanted versus what you had maybe expected what they wanted or needed, anything that surprised you.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Specific example is, and this was a huge cultural change in hospitality, we still have time clocks on the wall, but we also, through the same mobile app, rolled out the ability for them to mobile punch. And the amount of rotten tomatoes that got thrown at us by managers when we said, we're going to let associates punch on their phones, now it's geofenced. All the controls that exist were put in place to ensure that there's not fraudulent punching. Managers thought it would be the end of the world. It is now our most popular punch methodology. We collect more punches through mobile punching than we do through our time clocks today. So a year and a half ago, people were saying, you're inviting the end times, and here we are today, and it's where most of our punches come through.
[00:15:58] Speaker C: That's a great story and a great example. I can imagine that employees and associates, especially the younger generation, but anybody really, is really looking to organizations to use technology and tools and mobile apps because they do it in their personal life too, right? They use their phone for everything, so why wouldn't they want to use it in the work life too?
[00:16:21] Speaker A: I think at a certain point it's table stakes. If you sit back and say, we're going to do it the old way, at a certain point you write yourself off to extinction. Not that everyone's going to adopt it we still, when I say most, and it's the largest amount of punches, it's still like 53%. So 47% of people are doing it the old way, but we went from zero to 53 really quickly.
[00:16:45] Speaker C: What benefits have you accomplished? What outcomes have you accomplished in different areas to doing all of this?
[00:16:52] Speaker A: Yeah, so we seen about a third of our employees have at this point, work to shift that's not at their primary location or in a primary job. So I don't want to paint a picture that everyone's doing this all of the time, but a third of the workforce. Getting a third of the workforce to do anything is still a really big accomplishment.
We pushed the use case and the definitions of the shift marketplace and workforce management, I think, to a new level, introducing some of the controls and the flexibility around interlocation. And that actually caused us to win an innovation award from UKG last year, which is great.
But the other thing that gets me most excited is that my own business development team, when they're talking to new prospective customers, this is one of the top things that they're most interested in. Labor is the largest expense line in any hotel. We're just a business that runs on labor. So to the extent that we're thinking in new and innovative ways around how do we manage that labor expense, that's something that our customers, hotel owners, are super interested in.
[00:18:04] Speaker C: So this helped not just on the employee side, but really on the customer side too. That's pretty impressive. So it helped you create new business for Inbridge, which is fascinating.
[00:18:15] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. This is one of those things where it's hard to find the loser. It's good for the p and l, simplifies managers lives, gives employees flexibility, and makes us look better to our customers. So it's hard to find the loser.
[00:18:28] Speaker C: Everybody wins, right?
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Everybody wins.
[00:18:31] Speaker C: That's fantastic. Wow. Anything else that you wanted to tell us about that we haven't talked about?
[00:18:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm excited for where we can take this in kind of a 2.0 iteration. So right now, hospitality is a high turnover industry, and we onboard a lot of employees and we off board a lot of employees.
It's kind of transitory in nature. And what I want to take us to the next level with the ship marketplace is that where somebody might give us a voluntary resignation, because some things change in their life. They're moving, they're less available.
For whatever reason, they can't commit to a four or five day a week job anymore, that we would start capturing those people into our own contingent pool of employees.
We'd create this new classification of Aimbridge alumni, even though they're still active people that have previously worked in a traditional role where we say you're not going to be on the schedule automatically, but as long as you pick up two or three shifts a quarter, you'll be in this contingent workforce and you can log into the workforce management app and can pick up those shifts before we go out to more expensive solutions.
[00:19:43] Speaker C: As you said, it's a win win win for everybody. And I think very applicable too, in other industries too. I know hospitality obviously has this challenge, but many other industries, from retail to maybe healthcare to other shift based manufacturing, whatever you have, right? Lots of industries have similar challenges.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot of old industries that run on labor, ours included. But I think this is a fun example where you can bring some modernity to it and show how technology can actually play in some of these older industries.
[00:20:18] Speaker C: Absolutely. Wow, Conrad, thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation. I really want to thank you for joining us at the what Works podcast.
[00:20:27] Speaker A: Thanks for having me.
[00:20:28] Speaker C: Thank you.
And that's it. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Conrad Riddle from Aimbridge Hospitality as much as I did. What a great example of how to go beyond the AI hype to solve real business problems. Scheduling and workforce management are massive pain points in hospitality and other industries with hourly workers like manufacturing, healthcare, entertainment and retail. Comrades story shows how AI based technology can turn it from an administrative hassle into a competitive advantage that helps expand their customer base and create a better employee experience experience. If you found this episode of our what Works podcast insightful, tune in for more insights from leaders and innovators in the HR space. Thanks for listening.
