True Key Hotels & Resorts provide premium hospitality by instilling a culture of world-class collaboration
True Key Hotel and Resorts are a progressive and growing company who manage luxury resorts across British Columbia (BC)
Their highest priority is the care and comfort of their guests and resort owners which they achieve by delivering memorable vacation opportunities.
To earn the loyalty of their customers, True Key Hotel and Resorts have instilled the need for world-class collaboration to make sure their operations run smoothly.
We spoke to Karina Gaudreau, Human Resources Manager at True Key Hotels and Resorts to find out how making their processes and collaboration more efficient has played a huge part in delivering consistently outstanding service to their guests.
A new era with five star collaboration
True Key Hotel and Resorts manages around 2000 resort owners’ properties which are geographically spread out over BC.
Keeping on top of the vast amount of communication needed between the owners and True Key team is paramount in the management of the resorts.
Karina explained “Everything was shared by email so we needed a document sharing system; emailing back and forth was not efficient. I used SharePoint in a previous role and it wasn’t practical for our needs"
"I wanted something for True Keys so that we could move into the 21st century.
When I first started here there was no time keeping, everything was done on spreadsheets and I knew it wouldn’t do, so slowly we started to move things to digital.”
True Key Hotel and Resorts wanted a system they would be able to use with the team internally as well as keep their resort owners on board and engaged when sharing information.
When looking for a new system, collaboration and simplicity were deal breakers. Karina told us, “What was super important was that we needed to
be able to truly collaborate.
That was a deal breaker, and it had to be easy and not confusing. Thinking back to my old SharePoint days, I thought “There’s no way that people are going to adopt it"
A new era with five star collaboration
True Key Hotel and Resorts manages around 2000 resort owners’ properties which are geographically spread out over BC.
Keeping on top of the vast amount of communication needed between the owners and True Key team is paramount in the management of the resorts.
Karina explained “Everything was shared by email so we needed a document sharing system; emailing back and forth was not efficient. I used SharePoint in a previous role and it wasn’t practical for our needs"
"I wanted something for True Keys so that we could move into the 21st century.
When I first started here there was no time keeping, everything was done on spreadsheets and I knew it wouldn’t do, so slowly we started to move things to digital.”
True Key Hotel and Resorts wanted a system they would be able to use with the team internally as well as keep their resort owners on board and engaged when sharing information.
When looking for a new system, collaboration and simplicity were deal breakers. Karina told us, “What was super important was that we needed to
be able to truly collaborate.
That was a deal breaker, and it had to be easy and not confusing. Thinking back to my old SharePoint days, I thought “There’s no way that people are going to adopt it"
We have Workspaces for each of our owners and that’s where they go to find documents and information. It has been so well received from the resort owners
Bringing the team and customers together
With Ideagen Huddle, True Key Hotel and Resorts were able to create a culture of collaboration – setting the standard across their team, resort owners and stakeholders.
Working with a vast number of people in one area has given the team focus when collaboration and structure when following processes.
Real-time collaboration has made a huge difference in the way the team work.
Karina explained, “I work in Radium and my coordinator lives and works in Calgary which is three hours away.
It’s easy for us to work on documents together. I’ll leave comments for her to take a look at whilst working on the document and vice versa - I find it’s such a great collaborating tool.
With my general managers, when I need them to do things, I just assign the task and then it’s easy for me to go in and see if people have completed them.
It’s really brought us together to be more collaborative even though we’re geographically so far apart.”
Being able to collaborate much more efficiently has also brought teams together inter-departmentally.
Karina’s varied role in HR brings her into projects with the CEO plus every
department head across all their locations including Finance, Sales and Marketing.
For each of the projects, documents are pulled into the relevant Workspaces to make sure they are working on the same versions and collaborating in one place.
Bringing the team and customers together
With Ideagen Huddle, True Key Hotel and Resorts were able to create a culture of collaboration – setting the standard across their team, resort owners and stakeholders.
Working with a vast number of people in one area has given the team focus when collaboration and structure when following processes.
Real-time collaboration has made a huge difference in the way the team work.
Karina explained, “I work in Radium and my coordinator lives and works in Calgary which is three hours away.
It’s easy for us to work on documents together. I’ll leave comments for her to take a look at whilst working on the document and vice versa - I find it’s such a great collaborating tool.
With my general managers, when I need them to do things, I just assign the task and then it’s easy for me to go in and see if people have completed them.
It’s really brought us together to be more collaborative even though we’re geographically so far apart.”
Being able to collaborate much more efficiently has also brought teams together inter-departmentally.
Karina’s varied role in HR brings her into projects with the CEO plus every
department head across all their locations including Finance, Sales and Marketing.
For each of the projects, documents are pulled into the relevant Workspaces to make sure they are working on the same versions and collaborating in one place.
Security and reporting tipped the scales
The team also found some surprising benefits that tipped the scales for them.
Karina explained, “We were looking at a few other products. I think the biggest selling point was the security that we have with Huddle.
We can now adjust the access and permission requirements, so security was a big bonus factor.
The fact that we could limit who could see what information and what they could do with that information was perfect, and it was easy to set those permissions up!”
Being able to send reports back to senior managers was another surprising bonus Karina and the team found useful.
Karina exclaimed, “When I found out, I was like “What? There’s reporting too!”.
Being able to pull reports has helped Karina and the team feed back daily operations to senior management, and keep their customers up to date on organizational progression.
Security and reporting tipped the scales
The team also found some surprising benefits that tipped the scales for them.
Karina explained, “We were looking at a few other products. I think the biggest selling point was the security that we have with Huddle.
We can now adjust the access and permission requirements, so security was a big bonus factor.
The fact that we could limit who could see what information and what they could do with that information was perfect, and it was easy to set those permissions up!”
Being able to send reports back to senior managers was another surprising bonus Karina and the team found useful.
Karina exclaimed, “When I found out, I was like “What? There’s reporting too!”.
Being able to pull reports has helped Karina and the team feed back daily operations to senior management, and keep their customers up to date on organizational progression.
They think it’s great and they can leave comments for each other; it’s a really good way to communicate for them. Huddle is our single source of truth for everything.
Top three collaboration pain points
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External collaboration
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Version control
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Information in disparate applications
Increase in productivity
True Key Hotel and Resorts employees have seen an increase in productivity.
Managers are swiftly able to gather all their necessary documents from Ideagen Huddle, work alongside colleagues and make faster, more informed decisions,
particularly when it comes to organizing high profile events across the resorts.
Having their documents in one place helps managing communication without the confusing back and forth in disparate applications.
This means the team is always in sync and working at their most efficient across the company, resulting in happy guests, resort owners and event attendees.
Without Ideagen Huddle, Karina told us that
“It would be catastrophic. Huddle is so integrated into everything we do. I’ve
recommended it to so many people.”
Resulting successes
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Improved collaboration across more than 2000 resort owner’s properties
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Improved productivity and faster turnaround times
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Improved operational efficiencies with internal and external stakeholders
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Improved data security and compliance requirements
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Better data-driven decision making
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Improved version control
Ideagen Huddle offers dedicated project workspaces and portals for external collaboration, all in a highly secure single-source-of-truth environment