How this HR director is juggling burnout risk, fairness in flexibility and a looming slowdown in “luxury travel” as global cost-of-living pressures hit both employees and guests
As global tensions and cost-of-living pressures continue to reshape consumer behaviour, HR leaders in tourism and hospitality are once again on the frontline of a fast-moving crisis that feels “a little bit similar to COVID”.
That’s the view of Henna Chugh, regional HR director for IHG Hotels and Resorts, who leads people strategy for around 1,000 staff across eight properties, including Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and InterContinental brands.
Speaking with HRD, Chugh says the sector is being squeezed from both sides: employees struggling with rising costs, and guests cutting back on “luxury travel” as budgets tighten.
“When people are ahead financially, that tends to be the area they indulge in,” she explained. “But with the holiday, that’s where people sacrifice, so it’s not seen as a priority – and the effects do come through.”
Leading a dispersed, high-pressure workforce
Chugh is country lead for New Zealand, overseeing HR teams at four Auckland hotels, plus properties in Christchurch, Queenstown and Wellington. Each site has its own HR manager or director and coordinator/administrator, with Chugh holding both a property-level and regional remit.
“With New Zealand we’ve got about a thousand staff,” she said. “Each hotel has about two to three HR, and my task is to lead all of them… My role is essentially quite big in that sense – it’s on property for one of the properties, and then it has that regional lens attached to it.”
Connecting with such a large, dispersed workforce means relying heavily on strong local HR capability and disciplined communication rhythms rather than trying to engage every employee directly.
“To get through to a thousand people, it’s almost impossible,” said Chugh. “So you keep in touch with your general managers and your HR leads. With them, it is about having that frequent communication channel.”
IHG leans on regular Teams calls, email, phone check-ins and structured group calls across APAC and the New Zealand–Australia–Pacific cluster. The aim is to break issues down to a “granular basis” so local leaders can respond to market nuances quickly.
“It takes a conscious effort,” Chugh noted.
While the pandemic normalised remote work for many corporate employees, hospitality HR is grappling with a different challenge: how to maintain fairness when only a small portion of the workforce can work from home.
Pre-COVID, “working from home… essentially didn’t exist,” Chugh said. “Now, it’s not just the way of life, it’s the expectation as well.”
Back-of-house roles – marketing, HR, finance – can often work off-site, while the majority of staff, from front office to kitchen, must be physically present.
“Obviously, that privilege doesn’t extend over to your kitchen team or your front office staff,” she said. “Their roles are still quite traditional in that sense.”
For HR, that makes equity, not just flexibility, the central question.
“It’s about keeping it equitable for everyone, but how do you keep it fair for everyone? That’s the constant conversation,” Chugh explained. “Yes, flexibility comes in many different ways. But what does that mean for people on an individual basis? And how much can you actually influence it – and when do you need to scale back and keep it fair?”
Monitoring burnout in lean, volatile operations
Hospitality is naturally high pressure and highly seasonal, and labour is a major cost driver. Most hotels run “very lean”, Chugh said, so a single sickness absence can create a domino effect.
“If someone’s cold and sick, it has an impact,” she added. “Burnout… if they’re working long shifts, if someone’s cold and sick, or they’re wanting to work extra hours – in that moment there are a lot of drivers for them. It could be financial benefits. But over time, it can make an impact.”
IHG runs annual engagement surveys but, critically, supplements them with more frequent pulse checks and close monitoring of turnover data.
“We do rely on our HR managers to be on top of that,” Chugh explained. “They do pulse surveys every three months, just to know how things are progressing, and then they rely on exit surveys. If there are certain patterns building up within teams, then actually scheduling time with those team members as well.”
The combination of data and dialogue is key.
Chugh emphasised that her HR managers are the “eyes and ears” of the organisation, and that people analytics is used to generate insight, not just dashboards.
“With our reporting, with our turnover rates, how many new starters are coming through, how many people are leaving, what their reasons of leaving are – those are tracked through our systems,” Chugh said.
“That provides a bit of an insight into what’s going on. And then it’s about regular communication with the HR managers to make sure everything’s in place, and if there are any patterns or issues at a structural level, we are aware.”
Cost-of-living crisis: Redeployment before redundancy
For now, IHG New Zealand has avoided large-scale redundancies, despite softer occupancy and hesitant travellers.
“Already, managers on site are looking at the rosters and looking at people’s contracted hours,” Chugh said. “In the interim, is there anything that can be done with resourcing? Can we, across properties, share our staff so they’re not affected by the hours?”
With four properties in Auckland alone, cross-property job sharing and redeployment are front of mind.
“If someone is based in one city and we’ve got four different properties, are they flexible? Does that work for them? Can we actually job share?” she said. “Those are the HR conversations that happen behind the scenes, and so many times that work is invisible to your frontliners.”
The current approach is a hiring freeze rather than headcount cuts.
“If anyone leaves, then we’re just looking through our internal protocols to see where we can utilise the staff that we do have,” explained Chugh. “It’s still early days to think of long-term effects… If this sustains over, say, four months, then it could be something we possibly look at. But for now, we’re just assessing it.”
The moral weight of HR decisions
Amid P&L pressures and budget constraints, Chugh is clear that HR’s remit extends far beyond “hiring and firing”.
“When you’re on that HR end, you have to balance all sides,” she said. “You’ve got the business goals, you’ve got the P&L, you’ve got the budgets. But then you also have real-life people that you’re responsible for.”
“You don’t want to upset people or impact them financially. There’s also that moral compass that plays its part.”
For HR leaders in tourism and beyond, Chugh’s experience is a reminder that the invisible work of balancing equity, wellbeing, business viability and human impact is only intensifying as new crises emerge.
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” she said of the current environment. “Hopefully it’s a short one.”
