Each winner of the HR Excellence Awards has proved their impact on business by backing up their award-winning strategies with rock-solid figures.
To start our series focusing on last year's winners, we look at the victor of our most popular category: HR Team of the Year (Large Organisation).
Not started your entry? Look at 2024's categories here.
HR Team of the Year 2023: Atlas Hotels
An HR director couldn’t ask for a better team than Atlas Hotels’ HR department. Overcoming huge challenges over the past two years, the team has become cohesive, collaborative and agile, powering significant progress for Atlas’ people, even with no operational budget.
Totalling just nine – including the HR director – the team is responsible for 1,800 employees over the company’s 58 hotels and central office.
In early 2022, the hospitality industry was in a difficult spot. Many people had left the industry in search of more stable work, but demand was rocketing back to normal levels.
To compound these difficulties, Atlas’ HR team had been left rudderless after its HR director’s maternity cover fell through in 2021.
While they tried hard to support the business, morale was low; the team was understaffed, overworked, with clunky processes and ineffective systems.
Fast forward 18 months, and the situation is transformed. Even with five new starters in 2022, the team became stronger than ever before.
The first phase of this transformation was the team’s alignment behind urgent business goals in early 2022.
With 30% fewer jobseekers per role in the hospitality sector compared with pre-Covid levels, the focus was on recruitment.
At the start of its efforts, time to hire was 21 days – too slow for the industry, and too slow for Atlas. Overhauling its marketing spend, and building new candidate pipelines through the Department for Work and Pensions and employment charities, the team encouraged staff to rate Atlas online.
Increasing the number of reviews helped shift Atlas’ scores from 2.7 to 4.1 on Glassdoor, and 2.9 to 3.4 on Indeed in 2022 alone.
By the end of 2022, time to hire had plummeted to 14 days – and applicant numbers were up 160%.
Next, the team tackled its unwieldy processes. A new HR information system (HRIS) was called for – implemented in six weeks from the contract having been signed. Together with an end-to-end review of administrative processes, this meant that 383 hours of work was shaved annually. Where once it took three weeks to update employees’ salaries, in 2023 it took merely six hours.
Atlas' HR team managed to boost engagement significantly at the firm, exceeding the strategy's aims by offering targeted coaching to managers, implementing reward and recognition strategies, and improving communication and pay.
The team achieved all this while delivering two separate TUPE transfers – of 150 and 200 employees each – on time, in budget, and without any risk of litigation.
Atlas’ HR team’s tireless efforts to drive a positive culture and provide excellent service to their colleagues is routinely recognised: for the past 12 months, at least one member of the team has been nominated ‘Employee of the Quarter’, as voted for by central teams and operational stakeholders.
It is no surprise, then, that the HR Excellence Awards judging panel for 2023 acknowledged the team’s efforts: “What an amazing journey, in such tough times with very little resources,” one said, praising the team's "significant improvements on efficiency". Another judge described the Atlas team's work as "really solid, positive HR delivery" and "a great achievement".
