hr influencer
MEET THE HR INFLUENCERS:
Anne Marie Malleau, CHRE
LEADING THE PACK
By Kristy Rydz
Liu zishan & Zacarias Pereira da Mata/Shutterstock.com
If you want to work for Anne Marie
Malleau, you have to howl – literally.
“We have daily stand-up meetings
and at the end of each one with all departments
and in the lobby with senior
managers, we’re howling,” said Malleau,
the HR director for Great Wolf Lodge
Niagara Falls, the only Canadian location
of North America’s largest family indoor
water park resort chain.
“We feel that howling together makes
us all feel part of the pack,” she said. “It’s
important to be ‘on stage’ and deliver our
best guest experience in our setting. It
gets the families involved with this action.
If we howl and have fun, so will they.”
And it’s been working. With around
500,000 visitors – or 122,000 families –
making Great Wolf Lodge a part of their
lives in 2015, the HR community has
noticed.
Malleau was the winner of the CHRE
category in the Human Resources
Professionals Association (HRPA)’s
2016 Designation Excellence Awards
while the lodge took home the 2015
Canadian Human Resources Best
Employee Engagement Strategy Award.
Before carving out this distinct workplace
culture, she put her business
administration degree in management
and services to work as manager of personnel
for the riverfront then-Holiday
Inn in her hometown of Sault Ste. Marie,
Ont., where she initially manned the
front desk.
“I worked in guest services and then
I worked in sales, but I always watched
what our personnel manager did at the
time and thought, ‘I want to do that,’
because I always seemed to want to organize,
fix, help,” said Malleau.
As part of the opening team at Great
Wolf Lodge and leading their employees,
or “pack members,” with the idea of thinking
in terms of “we” rather than “me” for
nearly 11 years, she shared why she carries
that theme through every part of her job.
What are your main areas of
responsibility in your current job?
Anne Marie Malleau: I oversee a team of
five and within our role we have recruiting,
payroll, benefits, employee relations, training
and development, health and safety
and pack member engagement, as well as
being part of the leadership team to ensure
that our yearly goals within the lodge are
met. I oversee all aspects of the function
but yearly there’s a goal that I work with
that’s team-driven.
We work on what we call “wildly important
goals.” We always work on team,
guest and financial goals, with team
goals always coming first. My boss, our
general manager, and I work together
yearly to create what we feel, as far as
the stream of human resources, is our
most important goal. In 2015, recruitment
and engagement were our wildly
important goals, so what do we do to
focus on that? It’s that strategic thinking
critical partnership; it’s effective
HRPATODAY.CA ❚ SEPTEMBER 2016 ❚ 53