5 Further reading

Read the text and translate it, paying attention to the underlined words. Speculate on the training courses you would like to do at work.

MWB owns two of the UK’s leading hotel brands, Malmaison and Hotel du Vin, as well as MWB Business Exchange ("Business Exchange"), a leading serviced office provider.

Eye on the future

Porters, housekeepers and reception staff at the Malmaison hotel chain are used to keeping up with fast-living guests, from pop star Lady Gaga to John Terry and his Chelsea Football Club teammates. But they are not as familiar with the slower pace of “consolidation” that parent group MWB, which has earned a reputation for rapid growth, has instituted as it put expansion plans on ice for a second year.

Between 2006 and 2009, MWB, which also owns the Hotel du Vin brand, opened 16 hotels across the UK, offering staff a fast-paced working environment with plentiful opportunities to move into new roles or fresh locations. In boom times, staff motivation, development and engagement can almost take care of themselves.

It is a different story since the recession. “There hasn’t been the same breadth of new development opportunities for staff,” admits Sean Wheeler, group director of people at Malmaison. “It’s more of a challenge to maintain motivation and retain the best staff in our business. One year can feel like a long time in the hospitality industry, and we knew that to do nothing could make our top talent feel like their careers were stagnating. We had to ensure they felt like they were continuing to develop their careers.”

In previous downturns, staff training and development budgets were an early target of corporate cutbacks. In this recession, however, the Confederation of British Industry, the employers’ body, found evidence that many companies were trying to protect training and staff development budgets, despite cost pressures.

Malmaison, for example, ensured that all staff had an online appraisal to create a personal development and training plan. It set up a wine academy for managers and supervisors, as well as a training programme for kitchen staff.

“Forward-looking employers have continued to invest for the future in training,” explains Richard Phelps, human resource management leader at PwC, the consultancy. “The common theme has been a review of which programmes are critical for developing staff, with a focus on improving their content and results, while less essential programmes have been dropped.

Mr Phelps says employers that depend more heavily on the capabilities of their people, such as professional services firms and R&D companies, have shown greater commitment to engaging staff through training. “Some UK supermarkets are great examples of where brave people-management decisions have paid off to help them secure and develop the next generation of leadership cadre and pick up top performers at all levels from different industries,” he says.

Other examples include DHL Exel Supply Chain, the transport and logistics group, which has continued to deliver its “Active Leadership” skills development programme for managers. Hewlett-Packard UK, the computer group, runs road shows for staff presented by its managing director in tandem with a leadership training programme.

But while engagement experts accept that training and development encourage greater employee engagement (and vice versa), there is debate over how that link works. “I subscribe to the view that it is employees’ perception of organizational efforts to provide them with training, rather than their actual training experiences, that drives employee commitment,” says Mike Emmott, employee relations adviser at the CIPD. “In other words, what matters is evidence of the employer caring for the employees and helping them forward their career.”

Training and development provider Maynard Leigh agrees. “Most employee engagement is based on feelings,” says Stuart Mackenzie, managing director. “Employees ‘feel’ engaged, and that relies to a large extent on the trust they have in the management’s promises. Because the downturn made a lot of promises impossible to deliver, trust has been affected. We have not just been through a financial recession, but through a trust recession as well – and the latter will take longer to fix.”