Grupo Posadas Achieves Ambitious Performance Goals and Exceeds Financial Targets With Betterworks

The Situation

The largest hospitality company in Mexico, Grupo Posadas operates more than 180 hotels under 12 brands – from five-star luxury resorts and boutique hotels to more budget-minded options for vacationers and business travel. It is the top-rated hotel chain in Mexico, and is ranked in the top ten for diversity, equity, and inclusion and as a “Great Place to Work.”

In 2018, while developing its strategic plan for the next few years, Posadas recognized inefficiencies in its manual processes for performance, which relied on Excel and PowerPoint files that were time-consuming to develop and difficult to manage. The organization needed a faster, more efficient way to keep the team aligned on its mission to fulfill its strategic plan. Even after trying other performance management solutions, Posadas continued to have issues efficiently communicating priorities and expectations to its workforce across the sprawling organization.

The Challenge

Posadas identified four key areas it needed to address:

• Disconnected teams
• Unclear priorities
• Lack of accountability
• Unambitious goals

The Action

Posadas began the program with just 50 users in the executive committee and corporate strategy team. The organization adopted an objectives and key results (OKRs) framework to support strategic management and execution, using Betterworks as the platform to enable performance and bring its strategic plan to fruition.

Posadas began holding monthly meetings to both support adoption of the Betterworks platform and promote understanding of the OKR methodology ⁠— how to define an objective, the importance of different team results, and the establishment of metrics, or milestones. These meetings focus on developing, reviewing, and improving OKRs throughout each quarter.

The Outcome

Armando Smeke, head of strategic planning at Grupo Posadas, says Betterworks was able to help their teams maintain focus on company objectives even while experiencing major disruptions from the ripple effects of the pandemic. “When we started working with Betterworks, I thought it would help us with a lot of things, but I never thought it would help us with our mental health,” Smeke said. “Everyone knew what to do to keep the company moving. One of the key drivers to survival was our ability to keep working and keep creating objectives.”

Posadas tapped Betterworks and OKRs to support a new product launch that was struggling to attain initial sales goals. “Betterworks has helped us see where we are in relation to our goals, to pressure ourselves to think differently and to be honest with ourselves,” Cabrera said. “OKRs have forced us to think about those types of goals and see where we were underperforming. Betterworks helped show us we were not where we needed to be, and more importantly, to understand why we’re not there.”

Posadas continues to build on its success with Betterworks. From its initial rollout to 50 users, the hospitality company grew its program to 550 users in 2019, now cascading strategic priorities to five levels under corporate. Internal surveys indicate that employees company-wide are impressed with the results, with more than 90% of respondents stating that they would recommend both the Betterworks platform and OKRs.

The Impact

As it prepares for the future, Posadas continues to explore additional opportunities to leverage insights gained from its partnership with Betterworks and is evaluating expanding their program to include conversations, feedback and recognition.

According to Smeke, “If you talk with any of the members of the executive committee, they all would agree that Betterworks and OKRs are key for us to focus on the different priorities that we have. Everybody works. Everybody aligns. To us, that is our great history with Betterworks.”