Two Roads Hospitality: become agile to avoid organizational silos

We have previously shared our top tips to improve team relationships. This time, we consulted the experts to find out what makes their teams collaborative.

The news broke this week that Two Roads Hospitality, a hotel management company operating around the globe, has been acquired by Hyatt Hotels Corporation in a $480 million deal. In a changing corporate environment, closely-aligned teams and common goals become all the more imperative.

At the Direct Booking Summit: Americas in Dallas, Vice President Digital & eCommerce at Two Roads Hospitality Paolo Torchio said explained how his company has adopted agile team work practices. They have created scrum teams – groups of specialists from each discipline working together on common deliverables – and practice kanban techniques to visualize the workflow for all teams and set expectations and understanding for each team’s workload and deliverables.

Drawing from agile practices, Paolo advised delegates to limit the number of team goals they set in order to get teams laser-focused on deliverables. He also suggested to reduce the number of heads per task to a necessary minimum. After all, too many cooks spoil the broth.

At Two Roads, Paolo continued, the main challenges arise from the variety of available tools and team-specific KPIs. Solution: one dashboard for all disciplines to constantly check on their common progress.

At the Summit, Head of Revenue at Ace Hotel Group Terence Sham also stressed the importance of setting common goals. Terence expressed his concern over the territorialism that can arise among marketing, revenue and digital teams. At Ace, selecting team representatives and coming to a common agreement at group level before pushing the decision to the property level has helped to avoid conflicts.

Top revenue-driving advice from Ace Hotel Group: invest into different team goals depending on the need period. If teams can align their knowledge and determine which time of the year the teams have to put effort into each other’s goals, they will succeed.

Cady Wolf, VP of Strategic Accounts at Sojern, works directly with various hotel teams to help them drive their success metrics. ”Find out what KPIs for general manager, revenue and marketing teams are and narrow it down to the common goal you see across all teams,” Cady suggested.

If you have not done so yet, find a suitable collaboration software, help your team set it up and use it regularly, said Melissa Conn, Corporate Director of eCommerce & Public Relations at Paramount Hospitality Management. She uses Trello to keep all teams aligned.

Andrew Rubinacci, Senior Vice President of Revenue Management & Global Distribution at Omni Hotels & Resorts, reminded hoteliers that while teams will always argue that their goals deserve investment over others, common ground is crucial. When it comes to measuring key metrics, Andrew believes that it depends on the importance of a KPI to your business: while some projects only require a couple of metrics monitored by selective teams to drive an outcome, something like your parity rate has got to have the whole company behind it.

Every hotelier on stage pointed out the importance of looking at the same database and aligning goals across all teams. Educate your teams on the dangers of focusing on too-specific goals. In effective team collaboration, less is more. “Where we see people fail is when they go ‘we’ve got 50 great ideas, let’s do all 50’!” said Andrew.