GREETINGS FROM VANAJANLINNA AND SANTA’S HOTELS

There are good experiences to share

We have invited Tourism companies to share their experiences of how to manage the multicultural working environment and how to support their staff. Vanajanlinna Group and Santa´s Hotels tackled the challenge and shared their experiences.

Vanajanlinna Group offers work to employees from 17 different countries

Vanajanlinna Group´s most famous hotel is Vanajanlinna in the southern part of Finland in a culturally valuable environment. They have started to promote responsible values such as changing from energy to geo-energy and taking care of their staff.

Vanajanlinna proudly presents multicultural and talented staff (video and text in Finnish)

https://www.facebook.com/vanajanlinna/videos/571694706595973/

We visited Vanajanlinna Hotel and asked the managers to share some practical tips:

At Santa’s Hotel people from far away come back to work season after season

As many of Santa’s Hotels establishments are in Lapland, they have plenty of seasonal work to offer. In general, seasons are getting longer and Finland’s tourism strategy’s aim is to have tourism services running all the year round also in Lapland.

Santa´s Hotel representatives told that at the moment their staff haven´t in all cases declared seasonality as a problem as those coming from abroad are happy to go back home during the summer season.

Here are some points to consider from Santa´s Hotels point of view

Let´s open the door in English and then continue in Finnish

The tourism industry is growing faster than ever which means that more and more skilled persons are needed to work. Many very motivated people have moved to Finland from somewhere else, are looking for a job and have declared that it still is quite difficult to find the first job if Finnish language skills are not on a very good level.

Those who have moved to Finland from somewhere else and attended our workshops, also told that the best way to improve language skills is to work and learn while being in contact with locals. So – let´s open the first door in English, if needed, let everyone show their skills and then support them in Finnish language studies. It doesn´t really matter where one comes from, but the attitude and skills one has for the task needed.