For the second time in a row Kempinski Hotels has received the 2023 Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award (GEWA), which recognizes the most engaged workplace cultures in the world.
After another year of unpredictability in the workplace, Gallup found that Kempinski Hotels continued to put their employees’ engagement at the centre of their business strategy, embedding engagement into their very culture.

“Bringing it back to the basics is actually the magic,” says Melissa Salibi, Chief Human Resources Officer Kempinski Hotels and Member of the Management Board. “People just want to know that you care for them and that they can come to you for anything.”

GEWA winners’ ratio of engaged employees to actively disengaged employees is 16 times higher than the international average. Worldwide, only 21% of employees are engaged — that is, committed to their work and connected to their workplace — and just 32% of employees in the U.S. workforce are engaged. Seventy-two percent of employees at winning GEWA organisations are engaged.

“Gallup’s 2023 GEWA winners proved that even during some of the most challenging times, strong cultures are resilient and find new ways to get work done and meet customer needs. These organisations continued to make employee engagement a central cultural priority as part of their business strategy, and they maintained record levels of employee engagement while achieving or exceeding their business goals,” said Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace management and wellbeing.

Gallup’s meta-analysis on team engagement and performance is the most comprehensive workplace study ever conducted, with data on more than 2 million employees in 276 organisations across 54 industries and 96 countries. Highly engaged organizations significantly outperform their peers in important business outcomes, including customer ratings, profitability, productivity, turnover, safety incidents, shrinkage, absenteeism, quality, wellbeing and organisational citizenship.