Sarah Derry on championing diversity in the accommodation sector

Renowned industry leader Sarah Derry has been busy since stepping down as CEO of Accor Hotels for the Pacific region.

Recently appointed as CEO of Homeward Bound as well as launching Sarah Derry CoLab, Sarah sat down with AccomNews to chat about the importance of diversity in the workplace and why she’s working to keep it on the agenda. 

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You’ve had a very busy few months since stepping down from the CEO role at Accor, can you let us know what you’ve been up to?

I recently stepped into the role of CEO at Homeward Bound, which is a non-profit dedicated to supporting women with STEMM backgrounds to step into leadership positions. Additionally, I have launched Sarah Derry CoLab which is working in three key spaces around executive coaching, leadership and facilitation, and also business advisory work in the accommodation space. It’s been a soft launch so far.

Importantly I have been working with some key industry leaders to see how we can get a network together of like-minded women in the accommodation, travel and tourism sector. We want to ensure there is diversity of voices in leadership and executive roles and a pipeline to ensure women are being prepared to step into those roles in the next five to ten years. 

You’ve stepped into the role of CEO at Homeward Bound, why was this a natural next step for you after moving on from Accor?

I’ve always been a very purpose-led person, and when I left Accor, it was really an opportunity to rethink how I want to spend my time and I definitely wanted to do something that would allow me to give back.

Homeward Bound seemed like a natural fit as there is still an element of travel and tourism, because part of the programme is an experiential learning component, and the last seven of those have been held in Antarctica.

The second part is that obviously I’m very passionate about professional and personal development, particularly the space of leadership, so it seemed like a natural fit to be working in a space that was really around that. And then thirdly, Homeward Bound is all about getting more diverse leaders at the table so that we can solve some of the world’s problems. That really resonated with me.

With all the hats that you have on at the moment, it sounds like women in leadership and diversity of voices is something you are really passionate about.

Well, we know that when you have more diverse people working to solve a problem, that you get better outcomes, faster outcomes, and you get outcomes where people feel that they are included and they actually want to take action.

However, there continues to be issues with gender equity in STEMM, where women make up just 28 percent of today’s researchers and make up 10 percent of leadership roles. 

And the accommodation sector is another space where we do need to do more work. Recently someone showed me the ABS data that shows only 6.2 percent of CEOs in the accommodation and food services sector are female.  

We don’t have enough women in leadership roles. And we need to do more work on the pipeline of getting women to those executive roles. And that’s why I really want to work in this space at the moment, but I want to do it in a way that’s collaborative and working alongside the industry and its key players. We need all champions of change to support these initiatives.

I do think that I’ve got a responsibility because I’ve had such an incredible career and I’ve been very lucky to get to that CEO role, but that shouldn’t be such a rarity. 

What do you see as the biggest barriers for women in the accommodation sector?

I think it’s the classic ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. So number one is visibility of women in leadership roles. 

The second thing is we actively have to provide opportunities for women to have experience with a P&L and commercial experience. And that could be through mentorship, it could be by getting them on to projects, it could be having them go into a secondment type role, but you’ve got to actively create those opportunities. 

And finally, I worry, and this is not just within the accommodation industry, I worry about the movement to reduce flexibility in the workplace. 

By insisting everyone comes back to the office, for example, or back into the hotel environment, I worry that that is going to negatively impact women, particularly those who have been able to take more senior roles in the last few years because they’ve had some degree of flexibility. 

How can smaller operators ensure they are also focusing on diversity and equity?

I think we often look to the large operators to lead in this space, but to be frank, sometimes being big doesn’t necessarily help here because there’s a lot more bureaucracy, and you’ve got multiple stakeholders in the organisation. So I think there is a huge space for some of the small, medium Australian independent operators to actually lead in this space. And the reason I think that is because they can be more flexible, more agile, they can implement things straight away. 

How can independent operators ensure they are cultivating an equitable workplace?

Number one, there are a lot of conferences in this industry, so does your organisation have a panel pledge? That doesn’t mean that you never sit on a panel that doesn’t have diversity, but it means that you’ve thought about it and you’ve checked the criteria against that, and you’ve made a commitment. 

The second thing you can do is organise ways in which women can come together and network and connect with each other in that space. 

And finally, investing in talent, that’s one of the best uses of your time and energy. 

What would you have liked to have achieved by this time next year?

With Homeward Bound, we are expanding our offering. We’re going to a new destination beyond Antarctica next year. So we will have launched that and we’ll be going into a new continent as well for the experiential programme. We’ll continue to grow the global network of women who attend those programmes. That’s number one. 

The second thing I would actually like to see is Sarah Derry CoLab established.

Again also important is allowing women in the travel, tourism and accommodation sector to come together and advocate for these issues, and also working alongside male champions of change.

So in a year, I see that as being up and running and hopefully we will have hosted a few events where people can come together to support each other, learn and make change.

The reality is, if we continue doing what we’re doing at the pace we’re doing it at, we will potentially be in a worse position in five years time around diversity.

So that’s why I’m really passionate about keeping it on the agenda.