CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY – Articles

February saw, for the first time, the Global Restaurant Investment Forum (GRIF) come to Europe. [...] Taking the opportunity to be together in one spot, AETHOS caught up with Monique Borst over a cup of coffee in Amsterdam. Monique is a seasoned industry expert and can draw on more than 20 years of experience in food service and food retail. She has worked with world-recognised brands such as Harrods, Sodexo and the Compass Group, and has held commercial as well as board-level functions. Nowadays, Monique uses her corporate and start-up experience to help restaurant entrepreneurs kick-start and/or expand their business.

GDPR. Four letters of the alphabet that are proving to represent one of the biggest challenges facing businesses in 2018. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect on 25th May across the European Union (including the UK) and impacts any organisation that operates within the EU and/or that processes data of EU citizens wherever they may be in the world. How organisations hold, store and process personal data will now be subject to higher, and more consistent, scrutiny with the potential penalty for non-compliance being significant.

The issue of diversity, and the lack of it, has popped up frequently in recent conversations with leaders in the hospitality world to the point where it seems that if a candidate for a job is neither female nor of a minority ethnicity, then their application is at a disadvantage. Grey-haired white men continue to be the largest faction of leaders sitting around most hotel company boardroom tables. The good news is that a lot of these companies are self-aware enough to recognise that the composition of their leadership needs to better represent their customer and employee bases. In the same way that a fish rots from the head down, the thinking goes that changes at the top of the organisation will percolate down through the rest of the employee body, as staff become inspired by the leaders above them.

New trends in the board room are emerging based on AETHOS Consulting Group’s study of corporate governance in the lodging industry. This does not mean that perfection has been achieved in previously raised key areas. Unfortunately, we continue to see a few companies with classified boards, little diversity, questionable independence, and holding back as it relates to more performance based compensation.

Newer research increasingly implicates self-imposed barriers to women’s advancement at the workplace. We argue that the “glass ceiling” is now predominantly a misnomer and that the current challenges to advancement are best characterized as an “invisible obstacle course”.

A guide for assessing your company's ethics program, or starting one.