Hilton credits their 93% engagement rate to a strong ERG culture and a ‘virtuous cycle’ of benefits 

Workers are back in the office and business is carrying on as usual, but many employers are secretly struggling with a tired and disengaged workforce. Around 82% of employees are at risk for burnout this year, and HR teams across the country are worried about keeping their top talent as workers feel increasingly disconnected.  

Companies are searching for different solutions to the problem, but Hilton CHRO Laura Fuentes, who oversees a staff of over 178,000 corporate employees and 466,000 franchise “team members,” tells Fortune that they’ve found a formula that seems to be working for them. It includes a strong ERG culture, coupled with several in-demand employee benefits. That combo, she says, has led to an employee engagement rate of 93%, and a turnover rate that clocks in at about half of the food and accommodation industry average.

Fortune sat down with Fuentes to discuss the company’s mental health platform called Thrive at Hilton, a caregiving service that allows employees to engage their benefits and connect with professionals to meet well-being goals, and a financial service called DailyPay that gives users the ability to access their wages daily rather than at the end of each pay period.  

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What is Hilton’s strategy when it comes to recruiting, connecting, and supporting a workforce spread out among different countries?

We’ve got 20 brands at over 120 countries and territories, with the task to connect but also guide all employees at Hilton corporate and hotels, and over 400,000 team members around the world. We have a really wide aperture for where we source and welcome talent. Our recruitment and development initiatives are geared at supporting refugees, survivors of trafficking, and second chance careers. 

Once our team members join us, we have very strongly established resource groups. I chair the Black team member resource group (TMRG), and we also have a women’s TMRG, an abilities TMRG, generations TMRG, ect. Those are both safe and strong spaces that bring team members together, give back to our communities, and shape our business. They serve as mini focus groups for our business as well, which is empowering for our team members.

Back in 2017 we also launched Thrive at Hilton, one of our employee value proposition strategies, to connect all of our team members in the specific ways we support them. And what we’ve done most recently is build and launch our Care for All platform. We’ve always had caregiving resources and self care, but during COVID we realized our team members were really hungry for a one-stop-shop platform. So we aggregated all of our resources for managers, for team members, and extended those resources with a caregiving concierge, Wellthy. This helps people plan for care of others, whether that be elder care to college applications.

How does Hilton choose what employee benefits to invest in? 

Given our scale, a lot of initiatives are data informed. We survey our team members at least twice a year to truly understand their sentiments on all of our programs. What’s working, what isn’t, what can we do better. Then we launch programs, amplify them, and then ask members again. It’s a virtuous cycle, very much based on external benchmarks, team member sentiments, and data around the ROI of our programs.

Why is a standout example of an employee benefit that has improved retention?

We launched DailyPay in 2022 among our U.S. properties. 

I’ll admit that I was a little bit skeptical. I was coming at it with a very protective lens towards our team members. I wanted to make sure that while we’re encouraging savings habits and financial wellness, that we weren’t also encouraging folks to draw down on their wages immediately. I’m happy to have been proven wrong. 

This is extremely popular with Gen Zers—they like the satisfaction of working a day and seeing it there. 

As far as turnover stats, folks who are enrolled in DailyPay are 40% lower than those who are not enrolled. It’s really encouraging, especially when early turnover in those first 90 to 180 days are so critical to us retaining our team members.

Emma Burleigh
emma.burleigh@fortune.com

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