The Ever-Evolving Pillars of Wellness - Aldina Duarte Ramos
Aldina Duarte Ramos, the Global Director of Wellbeing at Accor, recently spoke on the creation of the company’s wellness pillars. As a wellness activist concentrated on implementing a global wellbeing strategy, she developed and implemented these four pillars to start the journey to widespread wellness within the different Accor brands. As markets adapted, so did Accor, and the pillars of wellness have evolved and grown.
Aldina highlights the journey and the value of the four pillars:
“We started with four essential pillars of wellness: sleep, food, sport and spa. It is interesting because sleep and food are essential pillars, they are vital. I explain it by saying that ‘when you are deprived from either food or sleep, you will die’. So through this explanation everyone understands that these are indeed vital pillars.
“The other two pillars, sport and spa, are not vital. However, if you do not take care of yourself or if you don’t move, guess what happens? You do not live a very healthy life, or even a very happy life.
“That is why we focus on these four essential pillars. We started nurturing them, and when people on our team as well as guests eventually grew used to them, we added a new pillar. Not only did we add a new pillar, but we also kept fine-tuning our existing pillars.
“When you work for years on the essential wellness pillars, you need to fine-tune them, you need to evolve with the market. The market matures, guests become more demanding, things are more challenging and everything around you has moved, so you do not stick to your four pillars: you have to evolve.
“This is what we did, we fine-tuned the four pillars approach. For example, food became nutrition. Sleep became about holistic design, meaning we embraced the whole environment, not only sleep. This was really key and something we were not ready to do before. Sport changed to movement because it is more than sport, it is about movement: the refinement of movement and the science of movement. Spa turned into us leveraging the spa because we wanted to create a clear strong business unit, which is not always the case. We wanted to make it stronger and bolder than it was before.
“The last one, which is very important, is mindfulness. We cannot do anything today without including mindfulness, it is an opportunity for us to create moments of pause and truth for our guests. This is critical because with mindfulness we can never deter from authenticity.
“So now we have five pillars that work extremely well across all brands. Then, according to one specific brand and their DNA, they can embrace these pillars and decide to make one stronger than another.”
