Connecting your Employees to your Org. Purpose: Sherry Vidal-Brown, CHRO, G6 on

Summary of Vlog Post by Emma Lokar, HR Intern (Ready for her summer 2019 internship)

Sherry Vidal-Brown, CHRO and Chief Communications Officer, G6 Hospitality:
How to Tie Employees to Company’s Purpose

Changes in Organizations Leadership:
As a psychologist, and G6 Hospitality’s CHRO, Sherry Brown, has a passion for helping people achieve more than they thought they ever could. Brown does this through her role, coaching, and helping businesses align people to achieve both personally and professionally. Often when leadership changes, and a new CEO is put in place employees are left questioning “is the direction changing?”, “are we still offering the same services?”, and “what does that look like?”. Upon the arrival of a new CEO, Sherry’s role as CHRO was extended to public relations for the company. The question became:

“What do we need to communicate and engage our employees in a way that is different and delivers what we are trying to achieve for our guest?”

Unclear Mission Statement, and Core Values:
It had been five years since the company took a step back and reflected on themselves as far as what their purpose is, and what their values are. G6 did not want employees to confuse the language of their core values versus their mission statement. They wanted their “external message with their guest to be aligned with their internal message with their employees”. How could G6 Hospitality accomplish this in a way that was less transactional, and getting all team members to embrace this purpose driven strategy into the entire culture of the company?

“If these messages weren’t aligned how were we going to deliver what we were promising, and who we wanted to be”.

The answer was much broader than what G6 provided to their employees or their guests.

How to Create a More Purpose Driven Approach
Sherry and G6 started their mission to align core values to their purpose, by dissecting their current mission statement and core values. They found by asking what they were trying to do differently, and what was new? What was new was why they existed along with what was important about their existence. This yielded three new questions:

What are we good at?
What are we passionate about?
What does our guest and the broader community need?

Through these three questions G6 found their purpose. They put this new initiative into effect through a six-step process.

How to Tie Employees to Purpose in Six Steps:
1 - Define Your Purpose
The company's purpose is more than just executive leadership repeating verbiage. In order to really define the key purpose statement G6 worked with leadership, employees, and guests. In addition to these entities they also leverage external resources, and external research about what their guests wanted in lodging and overall experience.

2 - Deliverable: Key Purpose Statement

3 - Test the Key Purpose Statement
In order for this key purpose statement to be effective, it is essential to test among your culture. Just as when you defined your purpose among more than leadership it needs to be tested with your employees, and your customers. The feedback is tremendous with their guests, how they provide a need, and ultimately a service.

 “It is great to get feedback about how passionate people are about your service”.

It was through this feedback when G6 Hospitality began to receive testimonials from their guests how they helped give people places to say during the California fires, and recent hurricanes. These stories began to spread to their employees who spoke about how they helped a guest in need.

4. Connect the Key Purpose Statement Emotionally
The key purpose statement needs to be more than just something employees know and can regurgitate. It has “to be embedded in their day-to-day work”. It is great to give recognition to employees who are displaying the values within the purpose statement. However, it is how you make it come to life that leaves a lasting imprint among everyone in the company culture. G6 Hospitality discovered the best way to connect emotion to the statement was through stories, and storytelling. It should be employees who interact with guests every day, not just executive leadership.

5. Reinforce the Key Purpose with Behaviors and Values
•    What does the key purpose mean?
•    What does it look like?
•    What does it feel like?

These questions not only connect the statement to emotion, but it also answers how you enact your key purpose in behaviors and values. G6 found it was the stories from their guests and employees. They are in the process of collecting videos of testaments. Sherry explained that the videos are a great tool, but in order to connect the stories to the entire culture they need to be told by their employees throughout the office. Employees will begin to find find things in common with helping a guest, and use past testimonials to inspire future interactions with guests.

Details from the stories are important, because it shows how others can learn from situations. The storyteller can provide tips and their story can demonstrate how going the extra mile shows how you care about a guest. This is the essential reinforcement that is needed to make the company purpose a natural ingredient in employee culture.

6. Measurements to Make Sure Your Statement is Working
To truly drive a successful culture change it is vital to have a way of measuring your progress. For G6 there are a series of metrics they receive from guests. Being a service-based business, their guests conduct experience surveys in addition to giving customer feedback on a daily basis

Again, in order for this to be successful it is not just one piece that needs to be tested. G6's culture is more than their customers. It is all groups that they serve, and this includes their employees. There are questions that they ask their employees as well:
•I have the ability to feel empowered to take actions to show that I care
•My manager encourages me to think of ways to demonstrate respect to others and our guests.
Employees and guests are surveyed to measure if G6 is living their purpose.

Lessons Learned
G6 hospitality is still learning and growing as their purpose initiative continues to move forward. Sherry explained that so far it is imperative to have a way to measure the success. Secondly, it is fundamental that your purpose is more than a plaque on the wall.

At the end of the day,  it is the employees feeling it and articulating the purpose in their own words. Not a senior leader’s words, but in their own words. Instead of putting it up on the company intranet, you are putting it in the stories our team members tell of what they’ve seen and how that purpose is lived out. Through that we hope people continue to tell those stories, and new stories. We want to evolve not be stagnant. We want who we are and our purpose to evolve and want people to come up with ideas we haven’t heard of before that fit within our purpose.

Culturally changing how they communicate and looking at doing it a little differently.

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BigHR Event: Experience as A Mentor

It was fascinating how much mentoring can happen in a few minutes. Sherry enjoyed the opportunity to interact with folks. Learned things for herself about how much HR talent exists in the metroplex. It was a huge gift to get to share a few things with those she interacted with, and great to interchange to help individuals to connect with other people who had done what they’re doing or struggling with. You also learn what other people are doing and embarking on. It is a rewarding and fulfilling experience.

P.S.  If you are leading in challenging times, and crave the (virtual) company of a group of HR leaders, join us in the HR Circle Group each month for live video discussions to solve your most pressing issues and learn from other HR leaders like you. To learn more:

https://www.chropartners.com/HRCircle19