My first ever job was technically playing football. I played semi-professionally for Sheffield United and Chesterfield, but when I realised that wasn’t going to pay the bills I decided to get an education. I went on to get a degree in Hotel and Tourism Management at Sheffield Hallam, where I am now on the advisory board.
I started out in hotel operations at Marriott hotels. Then, one of the HR team sat me down and asked me if I’d like to try working in HR for six months as maternity support. I started right at the bottom as an HR coordinator. In my first week in HR, I was dealing with an intense employee relations investigation and it really opened my eyes. I realised there’s a lot going on in HR!
The most difficult job I ever had was being an HR director at multiple Marriott sites around the east of England. It required a huge amount of stakeholder management as I reported to multiple people. There was also a lot of travelling: I had a five-hour journey down to Norfolk once a week. But I learned so much about owner relations skills, and financial acumen. The role also got me to my next step: opening the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, which at the time was Marriott’s biggest hotel opening in Europe. It was a huge transition, from hotels where you had to get purchase orders to do colour photocopying, to managing multimillion-pound budgets to open a hotel.
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I entered the world of super high-end luxury hotels with a role facilitating a £150m refurbishment of the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel. A refurbishment can really get under the skin of an organisation’s culture and means you can set up the team in the way you want it. But two weeks before we were due to open there was a huge fire and we had to close for a number of months. It was a tough time but I’m proud of the fact we managed to keep all 850 employees on board through that. We won an HR magazine award for it. We sent people off to get experience in different countries. A lot of people spent their time volunteering for local charities while we regrouped.
Unfortunately, six months after reopening, the Covid-19 pandemic started. I always say I went to The Mandarin with a head full of hair and I left with none!
I love my current role because of the opportunities that you have in a CPO role with an amazing CEO, CFO and COO. As CPO at Lore group, I’m at a decision making level and that’s really exciting. There’s so much trust in that senior team yet so much responsibility. I love the fact that the possibilities are endless. To give an example, we invested £1.2m into taking 21 different payroll, L&D and HR systems and consolidating them all into one global system for HR, processes, payroll, scheduling, and engagement, surveys, exit interviews and performance reviews, in multiple different countries, for the whole group. That’s something no one’s ever done before in hotels.
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HR in hospitality: How to succeed
1 Be adaptable
There’s always a new hotel brand with new ideas, and new pieces of legislation and regulation that challenge you to think about how you operate the business. You have to be on your toes.
2 Stay aligned
The business is quite complicated. You have to align the people strategy with sales, marketing and operational strategies, and you have to be able to cater to a lot of stakeholders through it.
3 Prepare for anything
My time at Mandarin taught me the importance of robust long- and short-term strategies, and the ability to pivot strategies quickly. I think that’s what helped us.
Jon Dawson was talking to Millicent Machell
This article was published in the May/June 2025 edition of HR magazine.
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