Cruising Altitude

How to Deliver a First Class Employee Experience Across Your Markets with Paulo Pisano, Chief People Officer at Booking Holdings

Episode Summary

This episode features an interview with Paulo Pisano, Chief People Officer at Booking Holdings, the world’s leader in online travel that includes several brands including Booking.com, Priceline, and RentalCars.com. At Booking Holdings, he heads the people agenda for their 20,000 employees. In this episode, Paulo discusses how to present a strong value proposition to hook great talent, how he tunes in to each of their markets, and how to provide a consistent employee experience globally.

Episode Notes

This episode features an interview with Paulo Pisano, Chief People Officer at Booking Holdings, the world’s leader in online travel that includes several brands including Booking.com, Priceline, and RentalCars.com. At Booking Holdings, he heads the people agenda for their 20,000 employees. In this episode, Paulo discusses how to present a strong value proposition to hook great talent, how he tunes in to each of their markets, and how to provide a consistent employee experience globally.

Quotes

*”By staying close to the realities and the dynamics of each of the markets we do business in, we ensure we are relevant. We are effective in engaging our people and ensuring that whatever we do or however we do our work, it's going to be aligned with the general expectations people might have in a given market.”

*”I remember one meeting in particular at that stage [in the pandemic] where we had a pretty busy agenda ahead of us. And I had an instinct to just wipe out the agenda and to have a meeting, to talk about how are we doing, just to do a long check in with the team and to go around the room and hear from each other what's going on for us. How are we experiencing this moment, this situation, where we are taking care of everybody else sometimes at the detriment of taking care of ourselves? And it was a very powerful session…A lot of very important insights on a personal level, certainly, but [on] a professional level as well can come from being able to listen to yourself more effectively, to what's going on for you.” 

*”That was a really powerful moment, when it's no longer just the company that is so to speak hierarchically taking care of employees, but when people start taking care of each other. When you start developing a sense of engagement that is not top down. It’s not structured or corporate, but an engagement that really shows the care that I was talking about, whether people really care for each other are trying to help each other… a lot of it was around enabling employees to help each other, to support each other, to support themselves…facilitating communication and connection in all directions around the organization.”

*”The effectiveness of your role in a leadership role in the HR space is much more around your ability to ask great questions, to put the mirror back to the person, to be a good coach, to build new perspectives than to just have the answer.” 

Time Stamps

*[3:41] The Flight Plan: Get to know Booking Holdings

*[12:02] First Class: Best EX practices at Booking Holdings

*[19:28] Turbulence: EX lessons learned

*[27:27] Advice for other EX leaders

Links

Connect with Paulo on LinkedIn

Check out Booking Holdings

Thanks to our friends

This episode is brought to you by Firstup, the company that is redefining the digital employee experience to put people first and lift companies up by connecting every worker, everywhere with the information that helps them do their best work. Firstup has helped over 40% of the Fortune 100 companies like Amazon, AB InBev, Ford and Pfizer stay agile and keep transforming. Learn more at firstup.io