InterContinental Hotels & Resorts brings brand experience to life with help from Grass Roots

The programme, called 'You Bring it to Life', included 140 InterContinental hotels across 60 countries and was delivered in over 20 languages. The focus of the programme was on bringing to life a brand proposition, based on local knowledge and personal attention, and the delivery of a truly individual guest experience.

The InterContinental Hotels and Resorts initiative was delivered to over 40,000 employees around the world with a total investment of 21,000 hours and £5.4million. The year long programme involved the engagement of leaders, managers and staff based in InterContinental hotels, corporate offices and reservations centers, through workshop-led learning.

Grass Roots who won a Gold award for their work with the InterContinental brand at the International Visual Communication Association awards, were responsible for consultancy and strategic development of 'You Bring it to Life'. Grass Roots also delivered the training content creation and communications; including the development of DVD and presentation and print materials in the various languages.

Speaking about the challenges of the programme for this region, Tom Rowntree, Vice President, Sales and Marketing for InterContinental Hotels Group for the Middle East and Africa, said;

"With over 9,000 colleagues across 15 countries in the Middle East and Africa, our concern was ensuring that the content and delivery of the programme was relevant to the diverse cultures within the region. With many of our hotels employing over 45 different nationalities, it was critical that the colleague engagement programmes in each property grasped the true 'in the know' essence of each destination. With locations as diverse as the ancient city of Petra to the modern skylines of Dubai, each had to be captured in such a way that would deliver authentic insights in every situation."

Mark Spicer, General Manager, Grass Roots Middle East, added; "At Grass Roots we help our clients achieve their goals by designing and delivering programmes that influence the attitude and behaviour of employees and customers. Winning the gold award for our work with InterContinental Hotels & Resorts was great recognition for all the hard work and team work that has gone into 'You Bring it to Life'. There is real pleasure in knowing we were able to make engage employees behind InterContinental brand values and make a real difference to the guest experience."

Commenting on the effectiveness of 'You Bring it to Life', Tom Rowntree said; "The branding reposition and culture change agenda was successfully delivered and remains a part of our on-boarding process. The programme is helping our colleagues around the world consistently reinforce key service differentiators which we know are important to our customers and make a real difference to their overall experience of the InterContinental brand. The hotels are now measuring success both through our Guest Satisfaction Tracking Survey and our Employee Satisfaction Programme; early results show tremendous growth in both."