Business
Hilton CEO’s focus on culture lowered staff turnover to half hotel industry average
Good morning. Chris Nassetta admits it took a long time for Hilton Worldwide to become a truly great place to work. Founded by Conrad Hilton in 1919, the hotel giant was acquired in 2007 by Blackstone, which brought in Nassetta as CEO. “We had this really unique culture, and we had sort of lost touch with it,” he told me earlier this week.
Nassetta more than tripled the number of properties to 9,000+, added 10 new brands, took the company public again, and successfully pivoted the company from owning properties to an asset-light model. He’s also reduced staff turnover to almost half the industry rate while generating high levels of employee satisfaction. The result: Hilton grabbed the No. 1 spot on Fortune’s 2025 list of the World’s Best Workplaces, compiled by research partner Great Place to Work. Here is a link to the full list, which Fortune published this morning.
Nassetta shared some lessons from turning things around:
Go top down and bottom up: “The top down is about making everybody in an organization feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves, like what they do matters. They’re seen. Bottom up is about the pay and benefits and programs like learning and development. We didn’t have a team member travel program and now we do. That’s a huge benefit.”
Tell stories: “We were telling the stories of all the things they were doing to help people understand why they matter and how that work aggregates up into something that’s really powerful. If you look at brands like Spark and Waldorf Astoria, the product and service levels are wildly different. What’s common: things like the technology and delivering a reliable, consistent experience in a friendly way.”
Stay the course: “It’s going to be really hard work. You need to be agile, but at the same time, you can’t jerk the wheel all around. This takes years. You can’t be chasing every little shiny object. I’ve been here 18 years. My number one initiative was to rebuild the culture and everything else would flow. And I started day one, grinding. I said things so many times I thought I would puke, but the people who were hearing it had never heard it before. We had to figure out the mistakes and adjust. Test ideas. Use real data. Do team member engagement surveys. Listen to what your people are saying.
I have 500,000 people. You can never really know what’s going on, so you’ve got to create the right infrastructure and the right listening posts, have the right data and make sure that you’re using it and acting on it.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams and Claire Zillman.
