Petra Slabá (OREA Hotels): You can’t make anyone smile Petra Slabá (OREA Hotels): You can’t make anyone smile Petra Slabá (OREA Hotels): You can’t make anyone smile

In this episode of the Kogi na ostří nože podcast, Pavel Kuhn talks to Petra Slabá, Group HR Director of IMEX Group and OREA Hotels & Resorts, the largest Czech hotel chain. She has worked in HR for more than twenty years and is also a certified systemic coach. She joined Orea in 2017 and has been part of its entire transformation. In hospitality, the product is the person who serves guests, cleans their rooms and looks after them, so every decision she makes has a direct impact on how guests experience the service.

When she started at Orea, the company had twelve hotels, and each operated like a separate island with its own culture set by its general manager. Thanks to a clear strategy and a recognisable brand, including the employer brand, the culture is gradually coming together. The key word is consistency. Guests should get the same quality of service and experience at every hotel. But Orea doesn’t want “an army of people who all smile the same way”. Individual hotels keep their autonomy and their own “wow moments”, depending on whether they’re in the mountains, in the south or in a spa town.

You can’t order a smile, Slabá says, “not even if I put a manager with a cane behind every employee”. People have to be intrinsically motivated and genuinely like people and service. The company’s job is to create an environment where people enjoy working and feel fairly paid and appreciated, and to do it every single day. Orea measures motivation with its own app. Employees’ open comments, she says, are so fast and precise that she can use them to plan what to fix and what to celebrate. Numbers can’t capture the atmosphere, though, so HR business partners are constantly out in the regions. Before every summer and winter season, management also tours all twenty hotels, talks to people about strategy and results, and then sits down with them for a good meal.

The results show. Staff turnover in hospitality typically runs at 30 to 35 percent; Orea is below that. Up to a tenth of new hires come through employee referrals. Orea benchmarks its pay against the median of the entire Czech market, including banks and IT companies, and is now at 94 percent of it. When it started, it was below the lower quartile. The company also hires chefs from the Philippines. An agency handles the paperwork, but Orea keeps the selection in its own hands: candidates cook on camera and managers talk to them. Onboarding matters just as much: newcomers receive information about the Czech Republic, its culture and even the weather, and Czech teams prepare for their new colleagues.

Orea sees itself as an innovator. It was the first to use robots that serve food and clean, and guests can check in and out online. But technology, Slabá says, isn’t meant to replace people. It’s meant to give them more time for guests. Receptionists freed from routine tasks have become advisers who recommend trips, places to eat and hidden gems nearby. The company takes the same approach to AI: an internal academy helps operations staff get rid of admin. She says she hasn’t noticed any fears among employees that AI will replace them.

What else will you learn in the podcast?

• How to unify the culture of twenty hotels while keeping their individuality

• Why you can’t order a smile and how to create a place where people want to work

• How to keep staff turnover below the industry average

• How to hire foreign workers successfully and why selection and onboarding should stay in-house

• How Orea turned its spa hotels in Mariánské Lázně into a family resort

• What advice to give an HR leader in an operations-heavy company

Petra Slabá sums up the recipe for success in a simple equation: a motivated employee means a happy guest, and a happy guest means a happy investor. For it to work, the HR strategy has to support the business and HR has to be able to measure results. “You can tell someone a thousand times about psychological safety. Until you measure it, it’s just words.”