How data helps us build a more human-centred culture at Booking.com
Paolo Pisano, Chief Human Resources Officer
Booking Holdings is the biggest name in online travel. The group operates Booking.com, KAYAK, Agoda, Priceline, and for restaurant lovers OpenTable. It is ranked 190th on the Fortune 500 with $21 billion in revenue and booked more than a billion hotel room nights in 2023 for customers.
Paolo Pisano is the group's Chief Human Resources Officer. He tells Aspire how he runs this mammoth organisation, how his team squeezes the most from data and analytics, and he reveals the secret behind his sense of intuition for what's really going on on the office floor.
Hi Paulo! Booking Holdings is an extraordinarily complex organisation. How do you describe it?
Bookings Holdings is an e-commerce company. We are mostly an online travel platform employing 24,000 people. We are global and present in pretty much every country, apart from the ones with sanctions. Our mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
What is your job?
Like the company’s CEO, Glenn Fogel, I wear two hats. I am the Chief HR Officer for Booking Holdings, the overall group, and the Chief People Officer for Booking.com, our biggest brand with 12,000 people.
Do you insist each brand has a similar culture? Or do they have their own unique identity?
Interesting question. Back in the day, some of our competitors also grew through M&A, but focused their energies into aligning culture internally. But our approach was different. We gained an advantage over time by making our organisation agile and encouraging each brand to focus on their unique offering. Today, that means each brand has their unique identity, but there are things that are common across all our brands in the group, so it's a mix. There are values that are the foundation of our culture. But the point here is that we don't try to align everybody from the top down.
24,000 is a lot of people. Do you keep track of everyone on a single system?
We do. We have an overview of employees across the organisation. That's not always been true. Over the last few years, we've developed a more unified perspective on the group. Like any group, what works for you in one stage of development might not be the best for the next stage. A few years ago, we realised that by having independent brands, we were leaving value on the table. So we started looking for more opportunities for coordination, collaboration, and for knowledge sharing across the group. That led to a more balanced view. I say balance because you never want to do it more than is strictly necessary.
You are renowned for your use of data. Tell us how Booking Holdings uses numbers to improve staff performance.
We are a very data-driven organisation. Booking.com has been very well known in the tech space over the last couple of decades for its evidence-based decision-making using A/B testing. At any given time, we are running thousands of experiments simultaneously. The data and insights from those experiments tell us if we should go right or left or pull back and do something different. Having that culture created a natural curiosity. If we do that for our customers, where else can we do it?
We gather information from all sorts of sources, including employee engagement surveys. We have data on sickness, voluntary attrition, promotions, including nominations and successful promotions, and so on.
There are a lot of data points!
We cross-reference that information to find patterns and insights. For example, we can look at engineering and see people who have been enrolled at a certain level but have not been promoted. Engagement surveys may tell us that the results in that area are not particularly high, so there is a higher possibility that a person is going to be disengaged or looking for another job. So, what can we do to intervene?
Can you give us another example of how you use data to manage people?
We were looking at every part of our organisation to see how to become more inclusive and ensure we had a diverse workforce. One department wondered if there was a reason why the ratio of promotions for women was not the same as men. We did the most basic thing, to look at the numbers. We examined the ratio of nominations and nominations to promotions. We played that information back to management. We found that just giving those numbers and providing visibility had an impact, without any active intervention.
I find so many times that just being able to look at the dashboard makes a difference.
Another area is, about three years ago, we identified an attrition problem in an area of our business. As we scaled up, we had people who went to senior levels in the organisation without having had formal or informal training to be better managers. That led us to invest more aggressively in manager development. We noticed a statistically significant positive difference for groups that went through the programme. So we were able to make the connection that okay, the investment is making an impact. We scaled it to most of our organisation and kept seeing the same correlations on improvement and engagement.
What unusual data do you collect in HR?
We do not do anything particularly unusual in tracking. We are very privacy conscious and compliant with the robust regulatory environment. So, my philosophy over the years has been that organisations often have a lot more data than they really know how to extract value from.
For us, the only area that's really new is to build a more complete perspective of representation from a diversity standpoint. Tracking gender is straightforward, but anything else is not only different but often limited by what governments allow. We've been moving with one of our companies on a self-ID initiative. Individuals can voluntarily self-identify on a number of elements. The addition has been pretty good. It is going to allow us to start slicing and dicing, particularly on engagement information across different groups to check if there are material differences. We are doing it in a limited number of markets where it is allowed.
The trick is not what you are tracking; it is how you cross-reference information and formulate your questions. What are your hypotheses? What are you curious about?
How do you use the insights from your run quarterly employee engagement surveys?
We do different timelines across the group. At Booking.com we do every quarter. Other brands we do a couple of times a year. We tend to do one deeper dive once a year.
We look at if people are engaged with the business and how proud they are of the organisation - we know that is an important driver of engagement, in the level of trust they have in leadership and the direction of the company, if they feel cared for by their manager. And there will be a number of issues where we go deeper.
There is always room for people to voice opinions and make comments. We look at a lot of that qualitative data because it gives us a lot more granularity and context. We are cautious, though. I've seen companies spend so much time just running the survey, analysing the results, and creating plans that it turns into a massive bureaucracy with very little impact. So, we try to keep it simple.
What can companies do to improve engagement?
Sometimes, what people are looking for is not necessarily an action. It's just an acknowledgement or clarification: 'What should I be doing? What should I not do? How should I behave? How should I collaborate? Which standards do we hold?'
Equally, if things are not working well, 'What is not working? Why? Is it a conscious trade off, or unconscious? Should we fix it?'. Something that is missing in organisations is clarity on what we are choosing to optimise for. Listening for us is a great opportunity for us to engage with that.
Listening is not just about surveys. It's about the interface between our HR business partners and the folks in the business. We make sure we have our ears close to the ground. Employee resource groups provide an amazing opportunity for dialogue and awareness. In the learning and development we provide, we have cohorts of people coming together, and we hear themes, stories, and challenges that people are dealing with. So, there are many ways to keep listening to the organisation, not just structured surveys or focus groups.
How important is it as Chief People Officer to travel into different offices and see people face to face?
It's critical. You need that experience, as well as the data. Some argue that intuition is the worst possible thing because it sends you into all sorts of biases. That's where analytics and data will save you. However, you also need to understand that data and analytics are very limited. Depending on what question you ask, you are going to have very different answers.
I've always been obsessed with data and insights, but I realised they were necessary but insufficient. Maybe it's a sign of age! As we grow older, we rely more on experience. You start noticing patterns. You can zoom out and see the big picture.
Sometimes I come into the office [in Amsterdam] and sit in the open restaurant at the entrance of the building and do a bit of work. I'm not looking for anything specifically. I'm there, noticing how people are arriving at the office, what groups are coming together, and sometimes someone will come up and have a word. And you pick up on things. It gives you a very soft sense of what's going on.
It's not a replicable formula. What it gives you is a sense of what questions to ask, and you weave a net of insights and perspectives.
It is important not just for HR leaders, but leaders in general. Anyone who wants to make a career needs that ability to connect with what's happening in the field. It's very valuable.