How can a company overcome the challenges posed by Covid and thrive once again? According to Ana Maria Sencovici, the chief talent officer at Royal Caribbean Group, the key lies in revitalizing career growth and development strategies.

In conversation with Tom Hudson, senior economics editor and special correspondent for WLRN Public Media, Sencovici says that prioritizing intentionality post-Covid helped the cruise company navigate financial challenges, adapt to ever-evolving employee needs, and emerge stronger as a result.

“We have a real constraint, which is our budget. And we need to operate within that,” she said. “So from a talent perspective, it’s prompting us to be essential, intentional, and super creative.”

Intentionality centers on replatforming the talent ecosystem and reevaluating the organization’s foundations—its understanding of careers, roles, performance, and more, “with a keen eye toward what matters, what moves the needle in an evidence-based way.”

Sencovici spoke at From Day One’s conference in Miami. During a fireside chat titled “How to Nurture Career Growth by Showing Workers What’s Possible,” she outlined a new five-destination program encouraging employees to explore their aspirations, see new possibilities, and launch their career journeys.

Hudson and Sencovici spoke in a fireside chat at From Day One's Miami conference.

The cruise industry struggled greatly during and after the pandemic. This period was characterized by port closures, financial trouble, and the need to rehire talent on a very limited budget.

Now the Royal Caribbean Group has managed to surpass pre-pandemic measures. Sencovici said it began with the organization adopting an employee-centric approach. Through pulse surveys, the organization discovered that career development was the foremost pain point for its employees.

“So we started where the employees were and thought, ‘let’s use that as the replatforming vehicle, as the channel and the delivery mechanism for all of this expectation-setting and development,’” she said.

The Five-Destination Journey

What emerged is the journey of five destinations, a program designed to integrate various elements within the talent ecosystem.

The first destination involves questioning how employees think about their careers, encompassing the basics of level-setting and performance.

The next takes an employee-centric approach. It asks them to consider what they want. What are their aspirations and goals?

The third is where employees think about what’s possible. It encourages them to consider the sea of opportunities available. Questions like, “What are the experiences that can be offered here? What are the skills that you can gain and the skills that will help you thrive, to set that foundation and educate, while at the same time inspire,” are asked, said Sencovici.

This builds up to destination four, which invites employees to “chart a course.” Once the goals are set and the opportunities are laid out, what will they do with them? How can the organization give them the tools to achieve their goals?

“One of the greatest skill sets to teach is learning how to learn,” Sencovici said. “How do we actually help integrate that from the beginning and teach people that muscle, so that no matter what skill is the next flavor of the month, we’ve invested in you to teach you how to learn.”

These initial learning and development-centric steps bring us to the fifth destination: employees taking accountability. This is where feedback mechanisms come into play. It involves educating employees to pull feedback from the system to determine if they’re on track to achieve their goals.

Key Findings

Considering that career development was a pain point found in their pulse survey, Sencovici expected more employees to sign up for the program. However, her team didn’t necessarily get the expected reaction.

The lesson she learned from this is to “never under-appreciate the mental bandwidth that is available to employees” who face many organizational demands.

Despite the low participation, Sencovici maintained that not making the program compulsory—and offering employees a way to opt in and opt out at any time—is the right approach. “The very reason for putting this forth was to enable an ownership mindset. If we say ‘chart your own course,’ and then we mandate that, people are actually building the muscle of ownership,” she said.

The second takeaway she offered to the audience and those tasked with making similar changes is to embrace resistance. “Resistance is always there. So, if you’re going through changes, you’ve got to acknowledge that and understand the benefit of resistance. And then infuse that into all the stuff we already know about change.”

Looking Ahead

The conversation also touched upon the Royal Caribbean Group’s trifecta proposal: a financial plan announced to shareholders and investors to help the organization recover from Covid losses over the next three years.

How does the employee journey feature in this scheme? Despite financial restraints, Sencovici said the company has creatively integrated the career journey into its initiatives on a very limited budget.

An example she described is the “Career Concierge,” an interactive video coaching session that takes employees through the five-destination journey. Because the systems are already in place, the organization easily interacts with employees at scale with little added investment.

To wrap up the conversation, Sencovici outlined how this plan will evolve in the future. The first year was all about building the spine of the talent ecosystem. The goal for the following years will be to add muscle.

The company will continue to provide the platforms, rituals, and habits that put employees in the driver’s seat. The goal is to develop a culture where employees feel empowered enough to invest in themselves.

Keren's love for words saw her transition from a corporate employee into a freelance writer during the pandemic. After having made her mark as a Top Rated Writer with over 2000 positive reviews in the extremely competitive Upwork space, and having been featured on various magazines and publications, Keren has now moved on to bigger and better with her own digital marketing agency aptly named Epic Owl. When she is not at her desk whipping up compelling narratives and sipping on endless cups of coffee, you can find her curled up with a book, playing with her dog, or pottering about in the garden.

Do Your Workers Feel a Sense of Belonging and Recognition?

Employees thrive and remain in organizations where they feel included and valued. Creating a comfortable space where everyone feels that they are heard and seen is crucial to recruitment and retention. During a panel discussion at From Day One’s conference in Salt Lake City, four experts offered tips and tricks on helping employees feel that they have a part in the conversation.For Emma E. Houston, chief diversity officer at the University of Utah, it starts with ‘hello.’ “One of the things that I make a habit of doing is saying, ‘Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.’ Because what is important is for individuals to be seen. So when you’re thinking about how you help people feel included, acknowledge their presence. Simply acknowledge their presence, and then the conversation can start from there. Just greeting someone on a regular basis, making that pause and making that acknowledgement that ‘I see you’ is one of the very first steps in creating a space of inclusivity,” Houston told session moderator Robert Gehrke, government and politics reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune.Matt Frisbie, chief marketing officer at AXOMO builds rapport in the workplace with stories, sweets (he prefers Snickers) and swag, which is appropriate since Namify manufactures branded gear. “The shortest distance between two people is a story,” said Frisbie. “We all have a story, we all have experiences that we can share. Ask open-ended questions and invite that [sharing], and try to get to their story.”Every Thursday at two o’clock, they walk the whole manufacturing facility with a box of snacks, says Frisbie. There’s everything, chips, Snickers, and healthy snacks, too. “But the point is actually to just walk in and smile, and say hello.”Weslie Porter, the director of culture and engagement for the state of Utah’s Department of Government Operations, shared a unique example of how different groups can have different needs, and they need to feel comfortable expressing those needs. He began by surveying attendees, asking who was right-handed [most of the audience], and who left [a few], and named scissors as one tool that is commonly engineered for right-handed people.“I have a left-handed friend,” he shared. They have to be very deliberate and strategic on where they sit when they go out to eat, he says. What’s interesting about this, as right-handed people, sometimes we think that things are just the norm. And so when we think about how we make people feel included, and feel welcome, we take a minute, and we realize that sometimes the norm comes from the majority.“And so the first step, specifically leadership, and even HR, when we're developing our job description, interview questions, whatever that might be, is to stop and realize, what about my experience is transferring into everything I do? And how do I get the different perspectives?” said Porter.The panelists discussed the topic "Do Your Workers Feel a Sense of Belonging and Recognition?" in Salt Lake CityWhat we can do is realize those perspectives will allow us to make better decisions. And more importantly, “it’ll allow our people to feel like they’re heard, they’re included, and recognized.” When they’re recognized, that’s when magic can happen, he says.Whitney Harper, the senior VP of people at Extra Space Storage, agrees. “I love the analogy of the left-handed versus right-handed. It’s imperative to “[create] those opportunities to listen to those perspectives, and to be open to that” she said.She adds that inclusive language is essential to creating an inviting and inclusive community in the workplace. Leaders need to ensure that “language is accessible to individuals to make sure that when we talk about DEI, we talk about inclusiveness, that we’re not using language that all of a sudden feels jargony.”Houston explained how the University of Utah has sought to achieve that goal, bringing stakeholders together to define what DEI meant for the school to create a consistent language. “We had 75 individuals in the room, creating the definitions of what we believe equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging access would mean at the University of Utah. So now we’re all holding ourselves accountable for what those consistent definitions are, and what the language is, and how we attach those to our values.”Porter has experienced how the language in job descriptions can impact diversity in the applicant pool. “When writing job descriptions, we have a tendency to use words that can mean different things that are bigger than they need to be.” Simplicity is key, he says. When the language is accessible and understood by all, there will be more applicants.He also touted Governor Cox’s initiative towards skill-based hiring, and his own experience being onboarded and welcomed as a completely remote employee. “We focus on the onboarding piece. Some of the data suggests that if you have that good onboarding experience, at the beginning, your attrition rate is going to go low, and [employees] are going to stay there longer for retention. So we really focus on that. In particular, those first couple of weeks are absolutely crucial to make sure that they feel that they can belong, and they can thrive. And we’re seeing some dividends getting paid.”Cynthia Barnes has written about everything from art to zebras from more than 30 countries. She currently calls Denver home.

Charting a New Course: How to Nurture Career Growth by Showing Workers What’s Possible

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