Grantley Hall

Grantley Hall is a luxury hotel located in Ripon, North Yorkshire. Bethany Stubbs, HR Executive tells us a little about the building and her role:

“We are a newly opened hotel—it was originally a derelict building, grade 2 listed—a lady called Valeria Sykes bought it in 2015. She had a passion for restoring and opening Grantley Hall as a hotel. It’s been a 3-4 year project for her. We first opened our doors on the 4^th July this year. Now, we have 270 employees, 2 of which are HR, plus a HR administration apprentice.

“I’ve been with the business since December 2018. For the first half of the year, our roles primarily involved recruitment. Things like creating employment contracts, setting up all of the systems, getting all of our staff on those systems, ensuring we were fully staffed, and had the right people ready for when the hotel officially opened. Following the opening of the hotel, the role developed more into managing the staff we had in terms of probationary periods, disciplinaries, one-to-one meetings, etc.”

“We mainly sought out Croner’s help in a support capacity,” says Bethany, “for me personally, I was new to the company and my boss was on holiday—and I needed some HR advice. I knew roughly what needed to be done, but I just needed to be sure I’d thought of everything and all bases were covered.

“This was particularly important as the issue involved the safety of one of our workers, and it was the first major HR issue I had to deal with in the business. Luckily the advice provided by Croner helped us resolve the issue effectively.”

“I would say I’ve used the advice line around 4-5 times since we’ve had the service. I’ve called up for support on a number of issues. One of them was regarding mental health, another one was regarding a potential discrimination claim. Whenever we have a sensitive issue—sometimes involving individuals with protected characteristics—we’ll come to Croner to ensure the issue is addressed correctly and fairly. It helps to ensure we’re on the right track and nothing is missed.”

“All of the advisors have been really helpful, Rob Pole in particular, who I’ve spoken to quite a lot, is very good. The way I like to work through issues is to talk them through, with Croner I can give the advisors a summary of the problem, and they can point out sticking points or things I hadn’t thought of. That way, I can address each foreseeable outcome before it has happened. Essentially, I’m using the advisors as a sounding board, and they’re really good for that.

“It also helps me retain that advice for future situations of a similar nature. Not every case is the same, but you can always use something similar as a precedent for how to tackle the problem.

“The service overall has been really good and really professional, I’d definitely recommend the service to other hotels, especially any with a small HR team. Previously, I’d worked at a company that had its own HR advice team, so going from that to this was quite daunting. Having Croner’s advice line there provides the support I need.”