Thai hotel group 'markets itself' to employees
Thai hospitality-management group Onyx has become both modern and international over the past few years, and this has given rise to innovative and original human-resources strategies and approaches. Onyx's executive vice president and chief people officer
As recently as 2008, the owner of Onyx Hospitality Group, Yuthachai Charanachitta, decided to take his business overseas. He acquired new properties abroad and transformed the purely Thai hotel group into an international hotel-management company.
Today, the company owns and operates 34 hotels in Thailand, China, Hong Kong and Maldives, and is aiming to manage an additional 40 hotels and resorts by 2018. It currently employs close to 4,000 people – about 3,300 of them in Thailand.
Positioning the brand and introducing international standards and practices began in late 2008, when president and chief executive Peter Henley joined Onyx. He formerly
managed hotel assets for Morgan Stanley and worked for large hotel chains, including the Intercontinental Hotel Group. He has since assembled a team of high-calibre senior executives. They include chief financial officer Thaveerut Charupatanapong, who previously worked internationally with Starwoods; chief operations officer Thorsten Ries, who formerly managed some Ritz Carlton properties; chief development officer Simon Allison, a “deal maker” who was formerly with Six Senses Resorts and Spas; and senior vice president for projects and product development Nigel Harris, a former Hilton hotelier.
Executive vice present and chief people officer Suresh Menon was formerly senior regional director of human resources for Hyatt International. He joined Onyx in late 2009, with the mission of establishing, from scratch, the HR systems and processes for the new internationalised Thai hotel group. Prior to his arrival, HR had been merely an administrative function, and one of his first tasks was crafting the vision and mission for the new HR department, and developing an HR business plan, or “HR issues”, for the group.
To support the vision “to become the leader of HR practices in the region”, Menon has drawn up a mission for the HR unit, which is to build HR “infrastructures” and to develop state-of-the-art HR initiatives to recruit, retrain, reward, develop, recognise and engage all of the group’s employees.
To achieve the mission, he identified six major areas on which the HR department had to focus: recruitment and selection, learning and development, performance management, career development and succession planning, employee marketing and rewards and recognition. It also had to come up with objectives and initiatives for each of the functions.
Asked to elaborate on the concept behind the “employee marketing” category, Menon explained: “We're talking about our staff being our 'internal customers', so we need to 'market'; to promote ourselves and manage our staff. We call them our 'team members.'” In a similar fashion to dealing with its customers, the company strives to inform, engage and recognise its staff.
“Inform, engage and recognise are the three key words. In doing that, we make sure that we maintain the brand as well, so that staff understand what Onyx is, as a company,” he said.
Referring to the “learning and development (L&D) function, he said the mission was to provide a comprehensive and continuous learning environment that would equip team members to create and deliver services that would be the envy of the group’s competitors. The HR Department was tasked with defining a core L&D curriculum, a staff orientation programme, “Onyx Care”– a core supervisory programme, a core management programme, a situational leadership training course and training for property pre-opening.
Thanks to more than 25 years’ experience in HR with the banking and hospitality industries, Menon has crafted many in-house systems and tools to uphold Onyx’s needs and brand values. The group is scheduled to announce its new corporate values today. They have been pared down to just four, instead of the seven values previously used.
ONYX currently offers a wide portfolio of hospitality brands, including the Amari brand of hotels, residences and resorts, the newly-acquired lifestyle serviced-apartment brand Shama, the all-new select service Ozo and the luxury Saffron portfolio.
