A hotel industry’s top exec has revealed the overwhelming positive support he’s received after tackling diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) head on.
During the Great Place to Work for All Summit last week, Marriott CEO and President Anthony Capuano spoke to the crowd about the cultural and workplace shifts on DEI and reflected on a moment he was met with unexpected encouragement from tens of thousands of emails from coworkers.
"The day the [DEI] executive order came out, I sat with our senior leadership team and I said: given the industry-leading position we have, we ought to make sure we're all aligned on, not only philosophically — how we think about this, which was the easy part — but what words we use, what language we use. We should talk with the board a little bit about it," Capuano said on stage.
"There's a very big hotel industry investment conference called the ALIS Conference," he expanded. "And so the next morning, I did a media breakfast. I did six one-on-one media interviews and then... we did the CEO panel. This was the first question in all eight of those interactions."
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President Donald Trump shut down all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices across the federal government during his first week in office and signed a number of executive orders to quickly undo former President Joe Biden’s efforts.
Not only did Trump shut down all federal offices, he signed two other related executive orders in January: one that ended discrimination in the workplace and higher education through race and sex-based preferences under the guise of DEI; the other was a memo to eliminate a Biden administration policy that prioritized DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration.
As a result, since then, top U.S.-based brands and companies have rolled back their number of DEI policies, like Amazon, Meta, McDonald’s, Boeing, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Lowe’s, Nissan, Toyota, Walmart and others.
When it came time for Capuano to answer the public on Marriott’s stance on DEI, he claimed he "mentally phoned a friend."
"I thought about what I'd heard from Bill Marriott all these decades. And what I said in response to those questions, we've been around for almost a century, political winds blow all different directions, particularly when you operate in almost 150 countries. I said, but there are some fundamental truths about this company that have guided us for those 98 years," the CEO noted.
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"We welcome all to our hotels, and we create opportunity for all. And fundamentally, those will never change, right?" Capuano continued. "The words might change, but that's who we are as a company."
"Then I went back to my room and said, ‘Gosh, I hope I said the right thing.’ In the next 24 hours, I got 40,000 emails from Marriott associates around the world just saying, ‘thank you.’"
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Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
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