“Our colleagues must be able to bring their true and authentic selves to work each day so they can care for our guests and provide welcoming environments. If we apply this concept of a ripple effect, we can drive widespread change together.”
Hyatt is a global company that welcomes colleagues and guests from all over the world. With this in mind, we know we must be deeply involved in actions that contribute to a more diverse, inclusive and equitable society. We see this as a ripple effect – colleagues must be able to bring their true and authentic selves to work each day so they can care for our guests and provide welcoming environments.
When the COVID-19 pandemic upended the entire hospitality industry, we knew it was more critical than ever to focus in on our vision of a world of understanding and care, particularly as the world was faced with another crisis: racial injustice. The murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and countless others represented an inflection point.
After closely listening to our Black colleagues and gaining insight into how Hyatt could best address racial inequality in our own industry, we introduced Change Starts Here, a set of commitments to further accelerate our DE&I efforts in three areas: who we employ, develop and advance; who we support; and who we buy from and work with. We have held ourselves accountable to these commitments and set actionable goals through 2025, including goals focused on workforce representation, supporting Black communities, and increasing minority supplier spend, among others.
We’ve taken many approaches to achieve these goals, including through our RiseHY program, focused on connecting Opportunity Youth (young people aged 16-24 who are neither working nor in school) with employment opportunities in the hospitality industry. We also created an Emerging Leaders development program in our ASPAC and EAME/SWA regions to help focus on career development for women, and engaged our global workforce to complete our Leading Inclusively workplace training to recognize, understand and respect diversity and promote inclusion.
Hyatt also recently launched World of Care – our global Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) platform – designed to address pressing challenges faced by our colleagues, guests, owners and communities and enact meaningful change within our industry. As part of this platform, we publicly disclosed Hyatt’s global gender and U.S. racial and ethnic workforce representation for the first time within our inaugural DE&I Report.
Sharing our DE&I Report and workforce data – as well as our commitment to share progress annually moving forward – is an important step in our long history of DE&I, reinforcing the importance of accountability, communication, transparency and empathy. We have also built on our existing practice of tying annual incentives to DE&I progress and announced in 2020 that we are linking executive stock compensation via our Performance Share Unit Plan, a key component of the executive team and group presidents’ compensation, to achievement of our goals. Similarly, all incentive-eligible colleagues have set measurable goals focused on DE&I.
To further position DE&I as a top priority, we have encouraged colleagues to interact with each other on shared values through roundtable discussions and within our eight Diversity Business Resource Groups.
The past year significantly impacted our society and enabled Hyatt to lean into our purpose – we care for people so they can be their best – more than ever before. DE&I is not only a business imperative but something embedded within our company and our values, as well as beyond our organization’s walls. We’ve found great success in connecting with other organizations, both corporate and non-profit, to share our initiatives and discuss best practices. This willingness to be open and honest in our learnings makes our DE&I program stronger and we hope other organizations feel inspired to do the same so we can collectively make progress. Through this, we hope we can further our vision of a world of understanding and care.
