I've been at Hilton for just about six years now and I’m responsible for compensation and benefits for many of our Hilton Team Members. I was previously at McKinsey and this was my first foray into the human resources space, but I love it. I love working with our frontline employees and thinking about how we can make their lives better. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is that most of the benefits that we provide are the same between our hotel and corporate employees. This is not 100% true, because there are things that we are precluded from offering for different reasons, but we do try to provide similar benefits across the board.

One of the catalysts for why I got interested in supporting caregivers was Joe Fuller and Manjari Raman’s paper, The Caring Company. After reading the paper and digesting the statistics around how caregiving responsibilities impact the ability at work across different age cohorts, we analyzed our Hilton census data and overlaid it over the Harvard data.

Based on this, we estimated that approximately 75 to 80 percent of our Team Members were likely caregivers of some sort and it’s impacting their ability to do their work.

We had anecdotal evidence of this, but seeing the numbers gave us insight into the scale, which is what led us to decide that caregiving is an area that we want to focus on.

We then looked across our benefits offerings related to caregiving and started to assess where we could do more. We did a big push on mental health support in 2021 and one of the most significant things that came out of that work was identifying that one of the places where we could most effectively move the needle was on reducing the stigma around mental health. Because of this, we armed and equipped our managers on how to support their people with mental health concerns. We did the same thing for caregiving in terms of providing training to our managers on how to support caregivers on their team and provide them with more context on what they’re probably dealing with. As part of that initiative, we had some of our top leaders record stories of being caregivers and we put them on an internal hub site so that team members could see them and recognize that others were in the same boat as far as being caregivers.

The genesis of the Care for All Hub came from internal focus groups where we consistently heard feedback of not knowing where to start to find information about caregiving. I have two young children and I’ve found it a little bit easier to find information when you’re surrounded by people who also have children, but for people that are taking care of aging parents, it can be much harder to figure things out like signing up for social security.

A key partnership which I’m really excited about is with Wellthy. For us, what was really compelling about Wellthy was the ability for someone to pick up the phone, connect with a care concierge, have a conversation about their situation and receive continuous support. They also have robust language capabilities, which was important to us. Spanish speakers and a site in Spanish was almost table stakes, because if we didn’t offer it in Spanish, we’d be precluding approximately 30-40% of our workforce from using it right off the bat. I also found their CEO, Lindsay Jurist-Rosner to be a founder with a strong personal narrative that is tied to their mission.

They have been great partners to us – they've been willing to try new things, join our leadership for conversations and join our employee resource groups to really try to get the word out. We’ve also expanded outside of the US with them to the UK and Ireland, and that's been going well. Our next question for them is, where else can we go with you? Employees in other countries have shown a desire to have a similar benefit, but the benefits systems can be very different both in terms of social safety nets and in terms of how they’re adopted culturally, so there is still more to figure out.

First off we assess the capabilities of potential partners.

One facet that we look at is their track record of working with other companies. We find a level of comfort knowing that the partner, for example Wellthy, has implemented and their product is actually available at other large, reputable companies. We also look at the track record and stage of the company to ensure that they’re staffed to actually support our whole organization, because when we come online, that’s 50,000 new employees who are going to have access to the benefit. Although they won’t all actually use it, we need to know if the team can handle the additional volume or if they’re going to be bursting at the seams. What this means for an entrepreneur is that they’re probably going to have to overinvest financially early to get into those initial couple accounts.

Other things that are important for us are language, like I previously mentioned.

I also like to know the narrative of the founder and more about the values and foundation of the company to get a sense of the people that work there and if they truly care about care.

One of the things that I’ve found with our partners at Wellthy is that they all seem to deeply care about caregiving because they have some sort of reasonable connection to it. Lindsay has a very compelling founding story and it permeates the whole company in a powerful way, which has led to activating everybody on our team too.

Once we’ve narrowed down what we’re going to do, we go to our executive committee and present it to them. We try to highlight a need and how a solution addresses it.

the metrics that we look at for the success of a benefit can vary, but one that is consistent is whether our people are actually utilizing it.

We also gather and review feedback, through both quantitative surveys and qualitative anecdotes about their experience. We always follow up with our employees who use the benefit about their experience and if they liked it. You’d be surprised as to how big of an impact that employee experience can make. We’ve seen a lot of these services that don’t live up to the experience we were sold on and when that happens, we cut them. In my role, I need to feel confident that when I push something out like Wellthy to our employees, regardless of if it’s our CEO or someone else in the company, who picks up the phone to call, they’re going to receive high quality service.

Ultimately, I think demonstrating an ROI on care benefits is very hard, because first of all, you’d have to determine the metric you want to measure.

For instance with turnover, is that actually reduced because I implemented a care concierge platform? Or is it because the economy's tightened? I think that if you're looking at benefits just from an ROI perspective, care is probably not the right place to be looking. I think that there are other programs that are going to probably give you an easier to measure ROI.

In terms of what potential partners present to us, we take their ROI estimates with a grain of salt, because aside from some very hardcore clinical type activities, everything else is the result of a study done by the company that’s selling the benefit.

It’s hard to say, but I think we will be looking at all of the benefits that we offer and evaluate all of our benefits holistically inclusive of care, compensation, financial wellness, 401K matching, and healthcare.

Care is a specifically unique one in that it has been a differentiator for us, because it's something that we felt was important and there’s no other hospitality companies or many other companies with hourly employees that offer much in the care space, so it’s been an attractive benefit from the talent perspective.

It would probably be a similar piece of advice for both. From an employer perspective, you need to go into this with buy-in from your organization. If your leadership team doesn’t believe in the value of providing care benefits, then it’s probably not going to happen. You need to have a shared belief and mission that this is the right thing to do.

And similarly for an entrepreneur, when they're going to pitch or they're going to sell, I think you also have to look at the company’s mission and look at what’s important to them. What have they done recently? What are investments that they've made? Hilton has been in the top three on the Great Place to Work list over the five years, and for a heavily hourly company, that doesn’t happen by accident. That happens because we work hard at it and we make investments in it. As an entrepreneur trying to sell a care solution, if you’re going to pitch at a company that's not even on that list, you're probably not going to have the same reaction.