How raising three sons shaped this Accor leader's HR style

Director of talent and culture at Accor, Jacqui Paurini, says the key to leading a human resources (HR) team inside a 24/7 hotel operation comes down to one skill: listening.

Speaking to HRD New Zealand, Paurini, who spent part of her 12-year Accor career in a talent acquisition role in New Zealand before returning to Sydney, said hospitality's round-the-clock nature means HR leaders are managing an unusually wide range of people at once – across generations, departments and personal circumstances.

"With world today, we've got, in my building alone, we've got five generations in the workforce," Paurini said. "All five generations have different expectations of what they want in a workplace, what their expectations are."

Her properties – Novotel and ibis Sydney Darling Harbour – hold 781 rooms between them, and Paurini says "at any given time there's a whole world happening behind those 781 doors."

Why listening matters more than policy

Paurini said her approach to managing that complexity draws directly from parenting her three sons. "I don't like look at them all as this is the staff, this hotel, they're all individual people with different needs, different passions, different wants, different goals," she said.

That philosophy shapes how she prioritises her time. "When somebody says they need me, it's sitting down and actually listening," she said. "Sometimes I've got nothing to say. Sometimes they just want someone to talk to, but it's actually giving that person, if I can, my full availability."

Paurini said staff often take weeks to build up the confidence to raise a personal or professional issue with HR. "It's taken them a lot to get to that point to be brave enough to come in and speak up," she said. "I think that's my key – building rapport and relationship with people."

The unseen carers of the business

Asked whether HR teams are effectively the parents of an organisation, Paurini said the role extends well beyond entry-level staff. "I think we are the unseen carers of everyone," she said, including senior leaders such as general managers. "We are also the ear to the general manager who could be having a really tough day."

She said staff frequently bring personal struggles into the workplace because, in practice, work occupies more of their time than home does. "People spend most of their life in the workplace more so than at home," she said. "So when something's crumbling at home, they're going to bring that to work."

Washing off the mental load

That emotional weight, Paurini acknowledged, takes a toll. She credited her husband, a former member of the military, with teaching her a coping technique passed down from his sergeant: physically and mentally "washing off" each day's burdens in the shower before returning home.

"I want you to get in the shower and I want you to wash your uniform off, wash your day off, but I want you to talk to it, what you're washing off," she said, describing the practice. "Although we care, it can't be our burden to carry. If we carry it, it begins to take a toll on us, then our husbands or our wives and then our children and then our home life."

Paurini said she has passed the technique on to every HR professional who has worked under her, alongside formal training such as mental health first aid. She said the practice does not mean HR professionals stop caring – rather, it protects their ability to keep showing up for their teams.

Paurini added that the industry's challenges are shifting but the priority should remain constant. "I like the idea of keeping the human in human resources, I think that's the most important thing," she said. "Thinking about the humans that are in front of us – it's firstly an honour, but it is difficult at the same time."

For HR leaders managing their own multigenerational, round-the-clock workforces, whether in hospitality or beyond, Paurini's experience points to a simple starting point: build the relationship before trying to build the change.