Making Corporate Responsibility a Top Priority with Margaret Egan of Hyatt Hotels

Hey, John, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

All right, I will. Well, let me again say thank you for being here, because this is fun. This is fun to have an opportunity to talk about things that we both are really passionate about, and I love the chance to speak for my colleagues. There are 200,000 people around the world doing great work for Hyatt and to support World of Care. So for me, this is just like I'm just the spokesperson, but I'm super happy to be here doing it. So, thank you. My background: I live in Chicago; that's where Hyatt's corporate headquarters are, and have been since its inception. And I live with my family, including two children — one who's in college, one who's in high school — so times are interesting and challenging, and actually super exciting right now with them. I lived in Chicago for most of my professional life. I grew up in New York, though. I think not far from you. I grew up on Long Island. You're from Queens, right?

So I grew up the youngest of 10 children on Long Island. I mean, they don't make families that size anymore. I grew up in Amityville, on the southern coast of Long Island. So, big family. Growing up in a big family, you learn pretty fast that the story is really not about you; you're part of a larger narrative. But it was a really wonderful background for me. I went to school in the Midwest, ended up in Chicago, and then eventually found my way to law school. I had always known I wanted to be a lawyer. I guess I was one of those nerdy kids who just knew that's what I wanted to do. But in my mind, that meant I was going to be a trial lawyer in court all the time, and very glamorous. So that's what I did. I went to law school and worked in private practice at a firm that I really enjoyed here in Chicago, and I was a commercial litigator. I did that for some time, and then my husband and I moved to the UK, so I had a chance to work in London. I spent about a year and a half at the American Embassy with the Department of Justice; they had a small office there. It was great, and I do love travel, so living in London as a launching point for travel for a couple of years was an amazing opportunity. Then we came back to Chicago, and I just lucked out: there was a position open at Hyatt, and I was thinking about a changing career, a different path — still law, but a different path. So I joined Hyatt, and that was 20 years ago. I came in from my background of litigation to support litigation and operations, and then things change, opportunities pop up. Over time, I moved from litigation to having absolutely nothing to do with litigation, which was a surprise, and then moving into transactional work. So I oversaw our transactional team at Hyatt for a number of years, and then finally had an opportunity for the General Counsel position, which I've been in for six years. Best job ever — I love it, love it, love it. Every day, even the hard days are good days. It's great work. And the last piece is being a part of World of Care, being executive sponsor for that. That really is the added element to the work that I do that just brings me so much joy and pride — pride in the work that our colleagues are doing. So that's the long answer to your question, or the short one. But that's Margaret Egan's story.

I was the youngest, which I think is — I mean, you could go on about whether that's good or bad — but yeah, I was loosely supervised, let's put it that way.

Right, I knew the rules and how to manage them. But no, five girls and five boys. A really wonderful way to grow up.

No, actually, one of my grandparents was, but he passed away many, many years before, so I never met him. But no, in my immediate family, it's just me. So maybe I'm the idiot, right? Everybody else is doing other stuff. But again, I love what I do.

Absolutely. So, you know, I mentioned before, we have 200,000 colleagues around the world. Our legal team is working in about a dozen offices around the world, supporting transactions, operations, just everything that Hyatt does. So my main role is as the head of the department, the Chief Legal Officer, and that involves compliance. Our team oversees our compliance programs. But you know, we have a department within our legal department that really, to me, is like a boutique law firm. We have these areas of expertise, incredibly talented people that have come to Hyatt, stayed at Hyatt for what Hyatt is: a purpose-driven organization. And that's a really important piece of all of this, of what we do and why I'm still here after 20 years, and why we have such great retention in our department. So that also captures what we call 'Secretary' as Corporate Secretary, and that's the governance piece because Hyatt is a public company, so that picks that up. And then there's World of Care. When we were looking at our ESG, some years ago, Hyatt has been in operation for almost seven decades, and we now operate in — I think the current count is 76 countries around the world, per our last 10-Q. So we've been having an impact in communities for a very long time. Hotels are their own sort of mini-cities sometimes within a city; they have a real presence, a huge colleague/employee base. So we had fantastic corporate social responsibility programs for a very long time, really focusing on thriving destinations. That's what this is all about: we're a travel company, we're supporting travel, and we want to do it in a way that's sustainable for people and in the destinations in which our hotels operate. So we've been leaning into that for a really long time. So when we thought about ESG, we took a look at who we are, what's our culture, what's our purpose, where do we make a difference. That's when I had an opportunity to step in as Executive Sponsor for World of Care. It was unexpected at the time, but when you think about what a lot of companies are doing, ESG sometimes does sit under the Chief Legal Officer, sometimes it sits in other areas. For us, it really just made sense at the time. I had a long background overseeing people in international offices. I'm all in on purpose. People joke with the phrase 'drink the Kool-Aid' — I drink the Kool-Aid, I mix the Kool-Aid, I'll pour you the Kool-Aid. I believe it; that's why I'm here. So it was a golden opportunity for me to expand into really different kinds of work. There's a lot to learn in the space, as we'll talk about, I'm sure. The challenges are daunting, the amount of work is daunting, but the payoff is priceless.

Yeah. Well, it starts again with our purpose, and our purpose is to care for people so they can be their best. So care is at the core of how we think about really all of the work that we do: how we reach out to guests and customers, how we engage in our communities. And it is the DNA that's at the heart of World of Care. We happen to have a more commercial-based loyalty program called World of Hyatt, so we thought about our purpose of care, which is the culture that Hyatt has lived for decades, and we thought about World of Hyatt as our passionate loyalty program, and that's where the language around World of Care came from. When we landed on that, I was like, 'That's it, that's perfect. That's who we are.' So the three pillars: caring for people, caring for responsible business, caring for the planet. If you follow ESG, it's a similar framework to ESG, but we were pretty deliberate about not wanting to get hung up on 'is ESG good, is ESG bad?' In conversations with people on any given day, you can get some really strong opinions one way or the other about the good, bad, or ugly of ESG. There's no need to get caught up in the politics or the polarization of terminology when we're all looking for the same impacts. So for us, World of Care is just who we are; it's the work that we do every day, the hearts and minds of our colleagues delivering purpose. And at the heart of that is empathy. You can't really care if you don't understand people, and there's a very big difference in hospitality between service and care. Getting good service is one thing, but getting cared for feels a lot different, and that's what has people coming back to our hotels, by the way. So we use empathy; it's how we problem-solve as well. We went out to our stakeholders and asked a lot of questions: 'Are we working in the right places today? Is there any aspect of our work that should be different, or where we're not showing up strongly enough?' What came back to us is that the work done by colleagues around the world in so many aspects of World of Care resonated well for us that they would fall into those three pillars. So, caring for the planet: we have science-based targets, we have 2030 goals. We have 2020 goals which we met and moved on to the next set. We're thinking broad-based about what those goals are, and we're public about them. Then we have operating regions within the company; it's a large geographic footprint, and each operating region has the responsibility to action our goals. It's my job to try to help them bring it all together so you can report up at a global level. So we look at that in a multifaceted way. When I think about caring for people, inclusion is the heart of hospitality. People feel welcome when they come into one of our properties, and our colleagues feel like they belong. That's really important to us, and it's also kind of second nature. It's not all that hard for us to figure that out. But we think about it in terms of well-being, inclusion, our benefits programs, things that are uniquely important to hospitality like human trafficking and human rights. So we've spent a lot of time on all of those topics; that falls within caring for people. Then caring for responsible business: I joined Hyatt 20 years ago because it had a reputation in the Chicago business community as having a business that runs on integrity. As a lawyer especially, you're not going anywhere shady; you want to work for a company that really holds itself accountable and does business in a certain way. That really resonated with me, along with an iconic brand and innovative product — innovative hotels and hotel design. So it should go without saying that responsible business is the core of everything we do, but we want to be explicit about it. That's the caring for responsible business piece, and how we partner with others around that and the governance we have around all of this. That's the high level, although I'm happy to dive into any little piece of it.

Oh, that's such a good question. There is a compliance element to the reporting side in sustainability and social and environmental sustainability. So there's a natural fit in terms of how are we going to report out on what we're doing, doing it with integrity, transparency, and accuracy of data. So that's an easy fit for someone with a legal background. And it's getting hard to keep up, actually, with the number of local regulations across the US and across the globe.

It's difficult. Yes, it's hard. You have to figure out which regulations apply to your business depending on your footprint, your revenue, where you have operations, and so forth. There's all of that analysis, and there isn't a real consistency across geographies. There aren't even real inconsistencies across the states in the United States, and that's one country. We're waiting on the SEC, and we'll see what comes from that. In the EU, the CSRD has reporting obligations that are more comprehensive across the span of ESG. In other countries, expectations are growing. For us, there are some pull-throughs in terms of data across jurisdictions. If we are clear in our strategy about what our goals are and how we're going to report against them, that's the starting point. So that's what we did with World of Care. We said we've got 2030 goals, and we have goals with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion that were really important to us, especially in the last few years, and we're public about them and our progress. We're already down the pathway of ensuring we have good data to make that information public. We want to be careful about that; any company, especially a public company, doesn't want to mislead people. We want people to really understand the work we're doing. But getting our arms around the changing regulations — there are a lot more lawyers doing ESG for a reason, and that's part of it. Will there be one unified system? No, I don't think that's going to happen. But I'm hoping that even just in the United States, we land on whatever it's going to look like, maybe driven by the SEC. The EU will have its own, and certain regions will have their own. There are enough consistencies across them that guide us in how we think about what we're going to plan for in the coming two, three, four years when it comes to reporting. It's kind of a mess.

Yeah, it's hard work. I will say, though, it's joyful work. The legal team and me in my role see a lot across the company, and I think that helps in terms of how we think about this. We have a wonderful communications team that we work with on World of Care reporting, an incredible head of sustainability, an incredible head of CSR. I'm on a steering committee with our CFO and our CHRO, and we collectively lean into how we bring World of Care to life and set the strategy for how we're talking about it and what we're focusing on. So it's certainly not me alone by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have visibility across the organization that gives me an opportunity to pull the threads together, if you will.

Well, it's a great question. I think the first thing is the buildings. Many hotel owners are building new hotels all the time, more and more with sustainability in mind, but there are hundreds of thousands of hotels around the world that are longstanding buildings. Like any homeowner, how do you manage energy consumption? These are businesses living in buildings, and the nature of our work is to serve big groups, have people come in and out all the time. We had an industry that provided single-use plastics, for instance. People love them; they take them home — 'I love this shampoo.' So we've had to move away from things like that to multiple-use toiletries that you can't take home anymore. It seems like a silly thing, but sometimes you go to hotels seeking luxury, and you want that little toiletry. We're removing all of those things because they're not sustainable, and we don't want to contribute to a landfill filled with little plastic shampoos. That's an operational issue. The buildings have been in existence for decades, and you can't always retrofit them. I would say our hotel teams are unbelievably creative in figuring out how to reduce energy usage or invest in renewable energy. We have hotels with solar panels, hotels with their own water filtration plants to manage water. All of them try to focus on food waste, with some really innovative ways of doing that. So there's a ton of passion at the hotel level, and there's a challenge in bringing it all together into a framework that also achieves our corporate goals, like driving on our science-based targets, reduction of waste, and reduction of energy usage. But I would say it's the buildings and the experience that guests expect to have in the buildings. Luxury — not all of them are luxury, but you have cleaning every day, using cleaning products. It's a business model that requires turnover; that's the point of it — you come for a night and you leave. There's work to support that that is challenging when considering sustainability. But it's very much on our minds, and I know other hotel companies as well. We have an industry association, America's Hotel and Lodging Association, that is taking some leadership around sustainability, bringing hotel companies together to support broader actions. We're a founding member of that. We want to stay close to the solution even while it's daunting.

Yeah, Grand Hyatt Hong Kong is a beautiful hotel, really gorgeous, and wonderful, warm people who work there — they really care for you when you're there. They replaced the plastic room keys with sustainable materials so they're no longer plastic. You might get a room key and maybe you remember to bring it back to the front desk, maybe you don't, and you find it in your luggage the next week. They cycle through them. They replaced them with sustainable materials. We have apps that people can use to enter their rooms as well, but that doesn't work for everybody. At Grand Hyatt Hong Kong, they came up with a way to replace the room key with a sustainable product. That's kind of interesting because a room key is an embedded digital tool, and they figured that out, which is really cool.

I do think so. Yes, I think we're all looking for ways to make inroads. You focus on the things that cycle through more quickly than others. Room keys are one of them, toiletries like I mentioned are others. I think you'll see more and more of that over time, and the products will become less expensive over time as well.

Yeah. We're one of about 250 companies that joined this program to support refugees. Since we joined, we've hired 500 of them. We focus our CSR philanthropy on education and job training for opportunity individuals. The Tent Partnership is an example of that. We also have Rise Hyatt, which is a signature program that supports training opportunities for people in circumstances where they don't otherwise have good job training. We've committed to hiring a certain number out of the Rise Hyatt program. We just celebrated our fifth-year anniversary of Rise Hyatt, and we've hired 5,300 people out of that program. We just love that. It's all over the world because you can see how that could make a difference in communities around the world. We know that you can have an amazing career starting in hospitality. We have leaders all over the organization who started as front desk or first-time entry-level positions at hotels and were able to move up. So that's what we're all about.

That's exactly right. If you're really good at it, you exercise empathy well. That's a skill, a muscle that you take anywhere. My boss always says he has two ears and one mouth; use them in proportion. Listen twice as much as you talk. That's a sort of joke around empathy, but it's true. Listening is really important. Nowadays, with what technology's done to us, it's made us more isolated and separated, even though we're connected through technology. Technology has depersonalized those skills, which are so important. Nothing beats having great empathy and hospitality skills.

Back to DEI and the importance of DEI. In spirit of mentoring, you're a woman in a very powerful, big-time leadership position. Talk a little bit about your Inspire program at Hyatt.

One thing I want to bring up — an issue that I wasn't familiar with at all until this summer when a movie came out called 'Sound of Freedom' about human trafficking. That movie made a big impact on my life and my family's life. Talk a little bit about Hyatt's zero-tolerance approach to human trafficking as a reflection of their commitment to human rights.

Absolutely. That's exactly it. Those are lives that are saved.

Inspiration is important, and aspirations are important. We look around to see what possibilities are out there, what kind of creative solutions are out there. I don't necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about how our work stacks up against the competition. World of Care was designed empathy-first, thinking about what our stakeholders want, what our colleagues are looking for, what our investors are looking for, the owners of our hotels who are incredible partners. What should we be doing? Does what we do comport with our purpose of care? That's the North Star. We say that all the time; it guides the strategy in World of Care and outside World of Care, in our business strategy and how we reach our guests and customers. If we're operating in a manner consistent with our purpose, and our colleagues give us feedback that we're on the right path, then I feel good about that. I don't wake up in the middle of the night worried about what another company may be doing. One of the most exciting things about World of Care for me is the passion that we've seen come through our colleagues. They latched onto World of Care; they get it. This is our language, who we are, our culture and history. They are all about it. I get notes all the time from somebody working on something, whether it's sustainability or something else within the World of Care framework, and they say it's made their lives different. They feel good about what they're doing. I want everyone who works here to love where they work as much as I love where I work. Benchmarking matters, and different stakeholders have different opinions, but we're about listening and figuring out the right spot for us. Change Starts Here is a signature DEI platform we set up in 2020. After the murder of George Floyd, we thought about all these things happening. We said, 'We've got great DEI policies, great training, we're good people — why aren't we making enough of a difference?' We challenge ourselves from time to time. Our hearts are in the right place, our heads are in the right place, but we weren't making meaningful enough steps. So we said, 'Okay, stake in the ground, let's think about this differently.' Get our colleague feedback, listen, apply those learnings, and go forward.

Well, we learned a lot of things about how we work during the pandemic. When there's true emergency every minute, existential levels of emergency, you work differently, collaborate differently. We came to realize we had opportunity to expand that experience and agile ways of working to work differently, to understand the mindsets we're bringing to work every day and how we could think differently, work differently, lead differently. I am incredibly excited, super jazzed about this next phase of Hyatt's history, or evolution I should say, because we are challenging ourselves to blow up the old ways of working and come at things differently. Somebody said to me the other day, 'It's not always the work that you do, it's how you do it.' That's what we're talking about. For us, it's all in the service of others; it's about advancing care. The way we work is intended to advance care, whether you're staying at the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong or for our colleagues. So I'm excited about the work. We're talking a lot about it here at Hyatt; we think it's an amazing unlock for us, and there's great opportunity ahead. I won't get into all the details, but it's fun, invigorating work.

Ah, thank you so much. It's been a wonderful opportunity for me. I love the conversation.