Director of People, Lime FMS 'We built a welfare hub to support a 96.5% female workforce'

It's no great surprise that 96.5% of Lime FMS's workforce are women, aged between 17 and 67. The harder question is what the people strategy looks like for a workforce that skews so heavily female, and it's one Stephen Seymour is refreshingly unsentimental about.

From winter school to the SVQ rollout

"I started off in training and development," says Seymour. It was the 90s, and it saw him land a job at a semi-government agency in Dublin responsible for hospitality training. I got a job in one of their winter schools. We took over a hotel that had closed for the season and turned it into a residential training school. The cooks would cook for each other, and we skilled up the others in housekeeping, bartending and restaurant work." He adds, "That job gave me the bug for learning and development."

At that point he decided he needed to move to the UK. "There weren't that many opportunities in L&D in Ireland at the time." It was a shrewd move. He landed a role at the Hotel and Catering Training Company and from there joined the Scottish Vocational Education Council to roll out SVQs.

Jurys Hotel Group was expanding and buying up other hotels to add to its chain, and he got the call-up to roll out HR for them. "I've never looked back since," he smiles. By this point in his career, his card was marked as heavily hospitality-weighted.

Going it alone

"I was going for interviews and being continuously told that I didn't have banking or manufacturing experience, for example, and I thought it couldn't be that different. So I decided to learn the ropes of business by setting up on my own," he explains.

That took the form of his own consultancy. "I set up Marmalade HR." I ask whether there's a Paddington Bear link to the name, and he laughs, with his characteristic honesty: "It was the only name that hadn't been snapped up, so I went for it!"

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After going it alone, he became Chief HR Officer for Hotelcare in 2014, a client that became his employer. In 2019, just before Covid hit, he was lured by Lime FMS, again the bedrock of his talents: facilities management services for the hotel sector. He joined as Director of People, and that's where he is today.

A pandemic, then a period of growth

The pandemic was catastrophic for most hospitality venues, but Lime FMS managed to keep the wheels in motion. "We had quite a few employees who were classified as key workers. Furlough, of course, saved us too. Overall, though, it was terrible timing, because we'd just started to get some momentum on the business and then everything stopped."

Lime FMS operates across 50 sites. "We're a smaller operator, outsourcing accommodation services including housekeeping. We send in a housekeeper, a team of room attendants, linen porters, public area cleaners and others responsible for cleaning and refreshing rooms," he says, explaining that very few hotels manage their own housekeeping now.

Today the business has around 200 full-time staff, with more working 12 to 30-hour weeks on part-time contracts. Post-Covid recovery has seen it enter a period of growth.

"We've got ambitious plans and we're developing technology alongside them. We've developed an employee app which we're launching very shortly. From an HR perspective, we're dealing with the Employment Rights Act and how that's going to impact us."