Four pillars of people

Tea Colaianni reveals the four key areas into which the HR strategy of the entertainment giant Merlin is aligned.

1. Engagement

There needs to be a big gap in talent to hire from outside the organisation in our established markets

“The first is maintaining engagement among employees as the organisation grows across countries and cultures,” she says. “In the past, we have had people engaged with brands and not the group, but not any more,” she says. “We have jumped from 119th to 15th in The Sunday Times’ list of the Best 25 Big Companies to Work For, so that work towards engagement is clearly paying off.”

2. Talent development

The second area is about talent development at all levels. “We’re delivering on a promise to grow people’s careers and we want to give people internal options,” she says. Merlin is heavily involved in succession planning and leadership development, she adds, “to make sure that we have the right talent coming through”.

All of Merlin’s six talent pipelines – finance, marketing, HR, hotels, operations and engineering – have talent fast-tracks and there are development and assessment boot camps to upgrade people quickly. The pace of development is necessary simply to fill the positions at new attractions as they open. “We hire 75 per cent internal and 25 per cent external for our existing estate, and itmore like the other way around for new locations. There needs to be a big gap in talent to hire from outside the organisation in our established markets, though,” she says. In terms of external recruitment, Merlin also has an international graduate recruitment programme, which this year is recruiting in South Korea for the first time.

3. Compensation and benefits

“The third focus is compensation and benefits,” says Colaianni, “as we do face competition at the executive level in key markets and we need to incentivise appropriately.

4. Growth

We want to draw a link between everyone’s performance and the performance of the company

“The fourth area is supporting the business’ growth, which is extra important. We need to make sure that as we open our new Midway attractions, our HR practices are consistent and professional. We will need 5,000 hires in the next three years, for this, and we’ve set up a department to support the openings of our new LEGOLAND parks in Dubai, Japan and South Korea to ensure that where there’s lots of hires they are done well.”

Colaianni says: “We need to empower our people to deliver memorable experiences, and that feeds into who we recruit, how we direct them and how we engage them. We expect people to interact with visitors, and everything we do is with the understanding that it might impact visitors.”

Every permanent employee gets a personal development plan setting out their objectives. Each is also eligible for the share save plan (40 per cent of the UK employees are on it and 29 per cent worldwide), and is on a bonus plan that is dependent on the performance of their team, their attraction and the company. “We want to draw a clear link between everyone’s performance and the performance of the company,” says Colaianni. “If they’re a shareholder, they ‘own a piece of the magic’, and there’s a vested interest in going the extra mile.”

If you enjoyed the above blog then you might also appreciate these other articles, which too originally appeared in the Hays Journal:

• Training at the top
• Why talented Chinese graduates are aiming high in Dubai
• Establishing an effective middle management tier
• Managing external resources
• Four pillars of people
• Family values

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