YOTEL's brand, values, and communication
reach global workforce

With a rapidly growing global workforce, luxury hotel chain YOTEL realized they needed a better way to communicate and align company culture across their six hotels. They found their answer in the Jostle platform and, since launching three years ago, haven’t looked back.

Challenges

As YOTEL grew, they discovered that email was a poor and inefficient way to communicate with such a large and diverse group of employees. They needed a richer tool that would:

Reinforce values and culture. YOTEL’s brand values are the backbone of their internal culture and external guest experience; however, they didn’t have an effective and consistent way to reinforce these day-to-day.

Enable communication and connection. With new hotels opening around the world, YOTEL was at risk of becoming a disparate company. To keep everyone connected—to each other, company culture, and work-relevant information—they wanted an online central hub.

Simplify recognition and reward. As a lean business, YOTEL needed an easy, affordable, and transparent way to reward employees for good work and publicly recognize their fulfillment of company values.

Solution

YOTEL discovered the Jostle intranet in 2012 and have found great success with the platform. They’re now able to confidently scale communication as they grow, and have since opened new hotels in Boston, New York, Paris, and Singapore.

Results

YOTEL have seen fantastic results. The Jostle platform has helped them overcome all of their initial goals and more. Here’s what they’ve been able to do:

Bring values and culture to life. YOTEL is successfully using NEWS Articles and the live Activity feed to communicate the expectation and application of their brand values. “The Jostle intranet is an excellent way of getting our values in front of our Crew. We also use it to reward people for putting our values into practice,” said Jo.

Engage everyone. YOTEL are big users of the mobile app. “It's critical for us,” said Jo, “because our cabin crew members [housekeeping] are a very transient workforce. It’s far more difficult to engage with them than the back-of-house team, and having a mobile intranet makes this a lot easier.”

Recognize staff. YOTEL uses the live Activity feed to instantly recognize and showcase good work. This is a simple but effective way to acknowledge staff, and inspire others to act in kind. “Our culture is made up of lots of different things, including awarding and rewarding people, and doing that instantly,” says Jo.

Improve orientation. “When we ask for feedback on orientation—and we’ve put a lot of senior people through orientation recently— feedback they’re giving us about the Jostle intranet has been fantastic, ” shared Jo.

YOTEL is benefitting from TEAMS, an up-to-date organization chart with a photo of each employee. TEAMS is connected to PEOPLE, which provides a bio and contact details for every individual. This enables new staff members to orientate themselves easily.

Simplify communication. The arduous process of sending company-wide emails is gone. It’s been replaced with NEWS Articles, which are simple to post and reliably reach every employee at the same time. Leadership can easily relay important messages to everyone, which brings a level of equality and inclusion to the entire team, regardless of role or location.

Conclusion

As YOTEL continues to expand around the world, they believe the Jostle platform will be an invaluable asset in retaining the strength of their culture and connectivity.

“A lot of our new upper management have seen intranets in their old companies,” said Jo, “but I don’t think they've seen anything that works. Belinda, our Global Operations SVP, loves the Jostle platform. She's over the moon with how easy it is to use. She can see it working. It's very simple. The only thing I get is positive feedback.”