Hilton’s Strategy for Becoming a Best Place to Work: Betting on Benefits

Hilton isn’t just a recognizable brand name with more than 8,000 properties around the globe, it’s also a recognizable name in terms of the workplace. The company, headquartered in McLean, Va., was named the best place in the world to work by Fortune and Great Place to Work in 2023.

Leaders at the hotel chain say, in part, there’s one big reason for that workplace success: a strong roster of in-demand employee benefits.

“We really rely on benefits to support our business and support our team members,” said Amanta Mazumdar, vice president of total rewards at Hilton.

Among others, those benefits include a comprehensive well-being program, caregiving support, pet care, earned early wage access through DailyPay, access to debt-free educational opportunities through provider Guild, and a travel discount program.

With so many benefits on its roster, how does Hilton decide which ones to offer? A lot of it, Mazumdar said, comes down to what employees say they want.

SHRM sat down with Mazumdar to discuss the firm’s benefits strategy, its focus on employee well-being, and the importance of employee feedback.

SHRM: How do you identify which benefits to offer and the challenges employees face that might require extra support?

Mazumdar: We use several data sources to inform us of what’s going on. We survey our team members, and we get really rich data. We survey all of our team members globally, and we typically get in the high 80s [percentages] in terms of participation rate. We hit 90% participation this year; that equates to about 144,000 team members who responded to our survey. It’s a 50-question survey that we do annually, and then additional open-text type of questions. We use that to see what our team members are telling us about benefits and other aspects of working.

SHRM: Is that the benchmark for where you choose to invest those dollars, and where you want to say, “OK, let’s think of a benefit to help”?

Mazumdar: Absolutely. When we are putting new things forward—new programs or changing existing programs—we are very data-driven on that stuff. We spend a lot of time thinking about what we are hearing from a feedback perspective, what we see quantitatively in our survey, what are the comments saying.

In the survey, for example, we comb through all of those comments to see how they relate to total rewards. We think, “Is there a benefit that can help address this?” What drives our strategy is what our team members are telling us, where they need help, and trying to address their needs.

And when we roll things out, then we use data to track how well the new programs are working or not. Are we seeing the right changes in terms of the feedback, and are we seeing utilization? It helps to see what is resonating.

SHRM: What guides you with your benefit strategy?

Mazumdar: Well-being is a big part of it. We want to improve employee well-being and, overall, see how employees are feeling.

But I would say, really, what drives our strategy is what our team members are telling us and essentially trying to address their needs. I always come back to, “Let’s make sure that we are the best we can be.” You're not going to get everyone, but let’s try to understand what they need. At the end of the day, we’re here to serve them.

SHRM: Tell me more about Hilton’s focus on employee well-being.

Mazumdar: Thrive at Hilton [the company’s well-being program] launched in 2017, and what I loved about it—and continue to love about it—is it takes this view of body, mind, and spirit. It’s this idea that to be well involves multiple aspects. It’s not just about gym discounts and the physical aspect, which I think in 2017 a lot of companies were focusing on. But it’s around these three pillars. So that, to me, created the framework for us, and then systematically, what we’ve done over the years since then is use that framework and then add programs, again, in a data-driven way, to fill in the gaps within that framework. We’ve been on a journey to add programs in those areas, whether it’s tuition assistance, enhancing our travel program, or caregiving support.

SHRM: Mental well-being is a big part of that focus. Can you tell me about one particular part of your mental well-being strategy that has made a big impact on employees?

Mazumdar: I’ll mention a couple that have been really helpful. One example is we lowered the co-pay amounts for mental health visits so that cost would be less of an impediment for people to go see a doctor. It’s super practical; it’s not a big splash. It’s a simple example, but it’s quite impactful for a certain segment of the population.

We also did a very close look at our EAP [employee assistance program] last year, which, for many team members, is the first line of where they seek care. And what we saw was that the wait time to actually get in to see somebody was longer than we would like it to be. So, we went out to market and did an RFP [request for proposal] on the EAP space. We actually went with a much higher-end EAP that we rolled out in January 2024. Now, our team members are able to see somebody in a matter of days, as opposed to having to wait weeks or, in some cases, months.

The third thing we did was we created with our partners a whole education curriculum around mental well-being—topics like resilience, stress management, time management, grief. These are all topics that we worked with various different partners to create education materials for. And what we did in the education materials, we made them in a way that it was like, “OK, if you have two minutes to learn about this topic, we have a really simple, one-page tip sheet that's available to a team member.”

Then, if you have a little bit more time, there are different courses through LinkedIn Learning, which we make available to all our team members, but they’re curated, so it can be something like, “Here [are] three courses around stress management.” And if they have even more time, we also have live classes through our partners. Depending on how much time you have and how interested you are in the topic, you can dial up or dial down what you want to do.

SHRM: What would your feedback be for other HR leaders, other companies, that are thinking about their total rewards strategy?

Mazumdar: Stay close to your team members. Stay close to the business, too. You learn a lot from speaking to team members about what’s really resonating, what's really working, what their needs are. Oftentimes, total rewards, HR, and benefits practitioners can get in a little bit of a bubble. And I think the best way to get out of that is to spend time with the business and spend time with your team members. That's the biggest thing that I encourage my team to do, and I try to do it as best as I can. That's energizing, too. You get to hear the impact stories, which is really fun.