Creating a Culture for Workers to Explore, Grow, and Belong

BY Katie Chambers | November 01, 2024

Vail Resorts has become a global leader in luxury ski experiences, owning and operating 42 ski resorts in four countries around the world: the U.S., Canada, Switzerland, and Australia. This comes after a period of exponential growth. Just 10 years ago, the organization had only 10 resorts. So, its workforce has had to grow and diversify as rapidly as its portfolio.

Being inclusive in a business with tens of thousands of workers at peak season means developing leaders to broaden their skillset to engage with people in a more human-centric way. That calls for showing workers how they can explore a wide variety of jobs, to expand their capabilities, and have a sense that they belong. Everyone shares the same mission: to create the experience of a lifetime.

Engaging Seasonal and Year-round Workers

The vast majority of Vail’s workforce is seasonal, Lynanne Kunkel, chief HR officer at Vail Resorts, shared during a fireside chat at From Day One’s Denver conference. We have about 55,000 employees total at peak, and about 49,000 of them are seasonal. And our seasonal workforce is our frontline,” she said.

Being in the experience business, she says, the company’s mission is to provide guests with the experience of a lifetime. This value system is also embedded in the organization’s human resources approach. “We create the experience of a lifetime for our employees, so they, in turn, can create the experience of a lifetime for our guests,” Kunkel said. “We put a lot of emphasis on understanding our frontline employee experience to make sure we’re [accomplishing that].” A large part of the year-round workforce are the frontline managers, so the company also prioritizes investing in their ability to properly support the seasonal teams.

Housing in resort towns is notoriously pricey, so Vail Resorts offers a program to help employees live within a commutable distance to work. “We build housing that is owned and operated by Vail Resorts. We also have master leases with other developers in our resort communities so that we can support employees if they want to come for a season,” she said. This is especially crucial for first-time employees who may be unfamiliar with and have little connection to the area.

Prioritizing Employee Retention

“Seasonal employees have a choice every season to decide: Do they want to re-up with Vail Resorts? Or do they want to go do something different?” Kunkel said. “And so, over the years, we have spent a lot of time trying to understand what differentiates the frontline experience.” Vail Resorts used the global labor shortage during the pandemic as an opportunity to refresh its employee value proposition, which is now: “Explore. Grow. Belong.”

Investing in employees is also top of mind. “We invested $175 million in employee experience through a combination of wages, benefits, frontline development programs, [and] frontline recognition programs, all in service to the idea that our frontline employees don't just work for Vail Resorts. They are Vail Resorts. They are the experience that is the differentiator for our guests,” she said.

Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton of the Denver Post, right, interviewed Lynanne Kunkel, CHRO of Vail Resorts

Kunkel hopes talented employees will “come for a season, but stay for a career,” attracted by different job types and the opportunity to participate in development programs for career growth. The organization has a workforce management system that allows employees to qualify for skills outside of their core responsibilities and try out new positions through open available shifts. Not only does this allow for upskilling, but it also gives workers the opportunity to take on additional hours for extra income.

The highest performing winter employees are also invited to stay through the summer for a special development program. “Epic Service Summer is an opportunity for them to get a differentiated development experience as part of their summer employment,” Kunkel said. The program has had a marked impact on both growth and retention. “We found that the participants in that program are getting promoted in their next season at five times the rate of their peers, and at two times the rate of their other high-performing peers. If they’re not getting promoted, [then] they’re moving laterally at three times the rate of their peers and two times the rate of their high-performing peers.”

Creating a Diverse Workforce That Reflects the Future of the Industry

Moderator Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, neighborhood reporter at The Denver Post, notes that the ski industry has a reputation for being “very homogenous.” Vail Resorts is striving to change that.

“We as a company have made a declaration that the future of the sport is inclusion,” Kunkel said. Vail Resorts has been using the CRM system Epic Pass to “understand our guests, and our guest behaviors and preferences, in an extreme amount of detail,” she said. “With Epic Pass and the data that comes from it, we’re able to make targeted investments in improving the guest experience in a data-driven way.”

Vail Resorts is also using data to understand the demographics of the industry and society at large–-and the gap that exists there. “Over 70% of skiers start the sport as beginners below the age of 18,” Kunkel said. With the majority of children in the U.S. being non-white, “the future of the industry is counting on these kids to start skiing before the age of 18. If we don’t invest now in building inclusive resorts where people feel welcome, our business will not be sustainable. The best way to make our resorts welcoming is to aspire to have our internal employee demographic mix mirror what we believe is the demographic mix of the future of the sport.”

Preparing for Continued Growth

“There are some changes happening within the company that were announced recently that are going to take place over the next two years,” Boyanton noted. Vail Resorts recently announced the commencement of a two-year resource efficiency transformation plan.

“We have three resorts in Australia [and] two resorts in Switzerland, and we are very committed to continuing to build out Europe as our next region of operation,” Kunkel said. “As we’ve looked at what it’s going to take for us to support the global expansion of our company into other geographies, this was a good time for us to take a look at our organization effectiveness [and] invest in some great organizational design work in order to scale the company to support that expansion.”

As it grows, Kunkel says, Vail Resorts will continue to invest in the employee experience. “The whole idea of this is to create a scalable platform as we grow, to allow our frontline teams to focus on the guest experience and give them the scalable tools and support that they need to be able to do that in the most efficient, effective way.”

Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.

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