Four Seasons and Workday: How to Manage Talent Around the ...

Four Seasons and Workday: How to Manage Talent Around the World

Four Seasons and Workday: How to Manage Talent Around the World

A global hospitality company with a world-class brand, a bench of management talent that is the envy of the industry, and fifty-five hotels in development--Four Seasons takes its brand and talent seriously.

That's what started the conversation between Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts and Workday.

"Talent management is the real business of Four Seasons," according to Mary Sullivan, Vice President of Corporate Human Resources. "We have two sources of competitive advantage: our brand and our people. When we go into a new location," she continued, "it's vital that we bring our service culture with us. That's the most important thing we deliver to our clients, and so we need to be able to mobilize our talent around the world to provide it."

A Critical Issue for a Fast-Growing Company But keeping track of this premium pool of talent was not easy with a tangle of disparate HR point solutions.

"We lacked visibility into our talent around the world," Sullivan observed. "It would take us an enormous amount of time to aggregate information, from the simplest things, like how many people work for us, to complex things, like what we are doing to manage talent."

These information gaps were becoming major barriers as the company made plans to expand. With 55 hotels in development (next up: Baku, Azerbaijan), the company needed to know what its critical talent needs would be in the future and what preparations needed to be made now. In 2010 alone, the company moved 75 managers around the world. "Keeping track of where they are, let alone what they're paid, and what their development needs might be has been very, very difficult," she said.

And how did Workday enter the picture? "I started to hear a lot more about Workday in the press," Sullivan said. "But we honestly didn't think at first it would work for us. It seemed almost too simplistic

Four Seasons Case at a Glance Manages 84 properties in 34 countries around the world; headquartered in Toronto

Number of employees 33,280

Workday solutions Human Capital Management, Talent Management

to deal with our organization, operating in 35 different countries, with very different rules around the world. "But ultimately we all came to the conclusion that this was absolutely the best solution for us," she continued. "This is a nontechnical way to describe it, but it's light. There's no infrastructure--servers and so on--that comes with an enterprise system. Workday's `lightness' comes from its cloud-based technology, which provides enterprise-class operations without the weight of on-premises solutions."

"It's very easily accessible from wherever you are. And it's flexible."

Mary Sullivan, Vice President of Corporate Human Resources, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts.

Because the company was burdened with multiple HR systems, a key aspect of their decision to move to Workday was the simplicity of having everything together in one system--human resources management and talent management. "Having it all together in one place is very important so we have the ability to predict what's coming," Sullivan said. "We understand very well what it means to manage disparate systems. When you have to update in five or six different places to have consolidated data, even something as simple as compensation management is very difficult."

Matching the Corporate Culture Caring for its talented managers is a long-held value within Four Seasons, which has been honored several times by Fortune magazine as one of the "Top 100 Best Companies" to work for. "Historically we have very deep personal relationships with our people. A lot of us travel around the world. We need to be able to get a very good handle on where people are, where they're willing to go, what we think their next position should be, some things about their

personal circumstances. Not everybody wants to live on an island," she laughs. "We want them to stay with us, to build their careers with us." And part of that is lightening the administrative load.

Because Four Seasons employees travel extensively, Sullivan is especially pleased with the Workday for iPad? application. She thinks it will provide new accessibility into the system for executives on the move. "They can study up on the hotel they're going to next," she said. "It's incredibly easy to use and it's in a format that's going to be most effective for them. "

Four Seasons believes technology should be easy, for both its guests and its employees. "We use in-room technology sparingly, just to the extent that it makes life easier for our guests," Sullivan said. "We want it to be apparent how to use it, and it has to be useful to them.

"The same is true for our employees," she concluded. "Technology has to be easy. It has to allow them to focus on the thing that's most important to them. For employees, it's about `How do I get out from under all of this administrative burden and make our guests the happiest they can possibly be and give them an experience that's going to be the memory of a lifetime?'" "It's to let employees access information and do their jobs more effectively, and represent the organization more effectively. It's to be able to attract and get talent into the organization, which clearly is a competitive advantage, and to be more effective decision makers. Workday lets us do all those things."

iPad is a registered trademark of Apple Inc.

Workday, Inc. | 6230 Stoneridge Mall Road | Pleasanton, CA 94588 | United States 1.925.951.9000 | 1.877.WORKDAY (1.877.967.5329) | Fax: 1.925.951.9001 |

? 2011. Workday, Inc. All rights reserved. Workday and the Workday logo are registered trademarks of Workday, Inc. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. WD4SEAS-12232011

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