Success, it’s said, is in the details. And that attention to detail—from fluffing pillows to listening to its employees—has paid off handsomely for Delta Hotels over the past 45 years.

“It’s paid off with a fairly good, comfortable workplace environment which translates to strong employee satisfaction scores,” says Bill Pallett, senior vice president of people and quality. “We now have empirical evidence to show that if you have strong employee satisfaction, you will have strong guest satisfaction or customer satisfaction. And that translates to profitability.”

Delta’s roots are in the west, Vancouver to be exact, where it built its first hotel back in 1962. Today Delta boasts 40 hotels and 7,000 employees across Canada. But it took them 30 years to realize, as Pallett says, that “customers want to be served by people like themselves.”

“I think the penny dropped back in the early ‘90s when we really looked at the fact that both our customer base and our employee based was multi-generational, multicultural,” he explains. “So the demographics really started to show us that it’s a diverse world both in the customer area and the employee area.”

Delta got to work and by the mid to late ‘90s had developed a program called Respect in the Workplace, introduced an employee assistance program that recognizes the fact that many of its employees come from demographic groups where eldercare and childcare are cultural issues, created a rigorous harassment-free workplace policy and set up an ethics hotline. Delta was also one of the first hotel companies in Canada to offer same sex benefits to all employees, “prior to being asked to do so, either by the government or our unions.”

“The types of things we have in place support that notion (of respect) and reinforce that there are certain values and guidelines at Delta,” Pallett explains. “I always smile when people say teamwork’s important. Well, yes, it is. But in order for people to become a team…we also have to get them understanding and respecting each other’s culture.”

The company works hard getting the best people for the job and has reached beyond its bricks and mortar by connecting with organizations that can help them attract, select, develop and retain top talent: jobpostings Canada and Ability Edge for applicants with disabilities, SkillsInternational.ca for internationally-trained professionals, and CARP for mature workers.

“These non-traditional sources are the new sources of recruitment. What will force this—good news, bad news, I believe—is the labour shortage in Canada,” says Pallett. “There’s no way around it. People who did not see these as traditional sources of recruitment—whether it’s the disabled, the mature worker, whatever—they will have to start to see these as traditional sources. They’ll have no other choice.”

For all its efforts, the hotel giant hasn’t gone unrecognized. Delta has received honours from the Travel Industry Association of Canada, the National Quality Institute, and for six years in a row, it’s been on the list of the 50 Best Employers in Canada.

“We initially got involved in the 50 Best as an external validation of what we do internally,” Pallett says. “While we knew year over year we were doing fairly well, we thought it was time to measure ourselves in the ‘real’ world. We continue to do it today as a benchmarking process.”

External forces aside, the sky’s the limit. Because, as Delta proclaims, it’s a company built on individuals.