Harmony in Hospitality: EDI initiatives to shape Tomorrow's Hotel Industry Leaders

By Loraine Kavanagh, MSc Programme Leader.

People are at the heart of hospitality. And due to the global nature of hospitality, fostering equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in our industry is crucial. According to the Institute of Hospitality (2022), businesses which promote EDI benefit in numerous ways including increased productivity, better staff engagement, and improved customer satisfaction.  

In this current academic year, Shannon College has students from 26 different countries across four continents. As an international educational institute specialising in training future hotel managers, we understand that EDI is not just incorporated into the curriculum but is at the heart of how we operate. At the curriculum level, Shannon College of Hotel Management offers modules in Intercultural Communication across all its programmes including Foundation and Postgraduate courses. In the last few years, the College has actively pursued other ways to create a cohesive environment across its diverse student and staff base.  

Perhaps one of the most important steps which the College took was to establish our own EDI committee comprised of both staff and student members. Since its establishment, the EDI Committee has investigated ways to promote and embed EDI into College life. One of the more recent activities was the It Starts with a Name initiative. The aim of this initiative is to promote the correct pronunciation of people’s names because our names are central to our identity and if people are not addressed by their given name or feel that they need to compromise their identities for social acceptance, their emotional well-being inevitably suffers’ (Panwar 2022). To learn how to pronounce names correctly, members of our College community were invited to either spell their names phonetically or rhyme them with other words (e.g. Niamh could be written as knee/of). Another step taken by the EDI Committee is the posting of our Inclusion Statement in our virtual learning environment. The Inclusion Statement is critical because it clarifies our shared perspective, recognising the necessity to articulate what we mean to avoid uncertainty and overcome diverse individual interpretations of inclusion. Academic staff post the Inclusion Statement within module pages on our virtual learning platform so that the statement is always visible to students.  

Our EDI committee was also successful in applying for our first Athena Swan Award in 2022.  Athena Swan is an equality charter mark framework and accreditation scheme, and the Athena SWAN charter is a framework that is used internationally to support and transform gender equality in higher education and research. The process of applying for this recognition was an opportunity for Shannon College to recognise and share good practice as well as to identify areas for positive action. The application process involved the College conducting a deep analysis on many issues including gender in the workplace and how the College fosters an inclusive work environment. This critical analysis helped us to identify what we do well while establishing a SMART action plan to further develop EDI. We are pleased to announce that a further initiative arising from the action plan is to offer a scholarship to support a student from a minority group that has not been traditionally represented in our student cohorts. 

Work to promote EDI in the College is not solely limited to our EDI Committee.  Over the last number of years, Dr Maria Palma-Fahey has been a passionate advocate for promoting inclusivity and understanding of other cultures in both professional and personal settings. Dr Palma-Fahey was instrumental in designing the Intercultural Communication modules offered on both the undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. She also delivered Intercultural Communication masterclasses to colleagues back in 2019 and since 2020 she has run a comprehensive Cultural Immersion Programme (CIP) for all new students at the start of each academic year.  The aim of this programme is twofold: 1) to help international students become familiar with Irish culture and provide a space to discuss the impact of culture shock and 2) to help all students understand and embrace cultural differences. This programme is well supported by staff, with many volunteering to run workshops in areas such as Irish Food, Language and Popular Culture.  

Apart from participating on the CIP, staff continue to develop their knowledge and understanding of EDI through continuous professional development programmes such as Race Equality Training, Gender Identity, Expression & Diversity Training and Unconscious Bias Training. Academic staff have also undertaken a course in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and use the UDL framework to inform their teaching practices and better accommodate individual learning preferences and diversity in their lecture rooms. 

Although Shannon College is a small school, we strive to embed EDI into our curriculum and core values so that we can create an inclusive learning environment for our students. We hope that our efforts positively influence all our students, many of whom are planning for careers in "an industry where teamwork and strong leadership is vital, so we need to prepare them on how to manage diversity and bring out the best in their teams" (Orla Cullinane, Head of EDI at Shannon College of Hotel Management). 

References 

Institute of Hospitality (2022) The importance and benefits of EDI. Available at: https://www.instituteofhospitality.org/meet-our-futures-forum-final/future-forum-the-importance-and-benefits-of-edi/ 

Panwar, R. (2022) ‘Why Getting Someone’s Name Right Matters’ Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2022/01/why-getting-someones-name-right-matters