Rancho Bernardo Inn

InnHancing career pathways for frontline teammates

The Opportunity

Rancho Bernardo Inn, a 286-room luxury resort located on a 265-acre property in San Diego’s North County, recognized a critical need to strengthen its organizational culture and address employee retention challenges. The hospitality industry faces ongoing struggles with high turnover rates and employee disengagement, which directly impact the guest experience and operational efficiency. The inn identified that their frontline teammates needed to feel more valued, involved, and invested in their roles to create a sustainable workforce.

The Rancho Bernardo Team joined Talent Rewire’s Employer Action Lab with a clear vision: To enable employees to “unfold their career stories” at the inn through meaningful career pathing and development opportunities. What became the InnEnhancement initiative aimed to address a fundamental gap where employees often lacked visibility into advancement possibilities, with many expressing uncertainty about how to progress from entry-level positions to management roles. Comments like “I would like to retire here” from employees indicated the potential for employee loyalty and long-term employment that wasn’t being fully leveraged due to unclear career progression pathways.

The business case for strengthening the inn’s culture centered on three key outcomes:

• Stronger customer service and guest experience
• Higher employee engagement
• Increased retention rates

By addressing the root causes of employee disengagement, the inn positioned itself to create a more stable workforce while improving the overall guest experience through more committed and knowledgeable staff.

The Approach

The InnEnhancement initiative centered the inn’s frontline employees and was structured around three core components: career mapping, enhanced celebrations, and “day in their life” content creation.

From the start, the team recognized the need for whatever initiative they introduced to be centered around its frontline employees. To do this, they established a 25-member impact committee comprising exclusively frontline employees from various departments. Critically, this committee was run by hourly HR team members rather than management, creating psychological safety and ensuring authentic employee input. This committee served as both the design team for survey questions and the feedback mechanism throughout implementation, ensuring the initiative remained grounded in employee needs rather than management assumptions.

Career Mapping System

The committee first focused on creating tangible career maps that provide clear visualization of advancement pathways across four levels:

• Entry-level
• Mid-level
• Management
• Senior management

These maps were designed to serve multiple functions, including recruitment, manager coaching during reviews, and employee self-advocacy. Most importantly, all employees have access to the career maps for all departments, essential to breaking down silos and expanding awareness of cross-functional opportunities.

Enhanced Recognition and Communication

InnEnhancement redesigned how the organization celebrates employee achievements, in a way that consistently highlights transfers, promotions, and internal changes through various on-property communication channels. This approach emphasized internal mobility and success stories to reinforce the culture of advancement.

“Day in the Life” Campaign

The team has introduced “day in their life” video campaigns which provide realistic job previews for various roles across the organization and give employees and potential candidates authentic insights into different positions, supporting both internal mobility decisions and external recruitment efforts. The career maps will also be enhanced with more detailed role descriptions and requirements, making them more actionable for employee career planning.

Alongside these relational improvements, the inn implemented several structural modifications by overhauling their performance review system, moving from a rigid 1-4 numerical grading system to open-ended, conversation-focused templates. This change transformed the review process and created space for meaningful dialogue about career aspirations and growth opportunities.

Additionally, the organization invested in frontline manager training programs focusing on developing relational leadership capabilities to better equip managers to support their teams’ career development and engagement.

Next Steps

Measurement and Feedback Integration

The initiative incorporated five career development-focused questions into their annual company-wide survey, providing quantitative data to complement the qualitative feedback from the impact committee. This dual approach ensured they would get essential employee data and a nuanced understanding of employee sentiment.

Success Metrics and Monitoring

Short-term success indicators include positive feedback from the impact committee and successful distribution of career mapping resources. Medium-term objectives focus on measurable increases in internal promotion and transfer rates, along with higher utilization of existing tuition reimbursement programs. Long-term success will be evaluated through improved retention rates and sustained cultural transformation where employees consistently feel valued and invested in by the organization.

Measuring Success

The development and implementation of the LEVEL UP pilot is one way that Rush is building HR policies, practices, and programs that support workforce development and its frontline. The team is also working with leadership to:

• Ensure current HR policies and practices support workforce development planning
• Foster an environment where employees feel empowered and safe to seek information about their career development and advancement opportunities
• Build training and coaching for managers to support the organization’s workforce development and career pathing
• Allocate resources for workforce development programs including approving compensation for mentors and allowing time on shift for employees to complete training requirements

The goal is for LEVEL UP to be a bridge to a full career pathing platform that will help employees and managers identify opportunities for training, skill building, and meaningful career pathways that provide opportunities for economic mobility and stability. Rush believes that talent comes from within and is committed to increasing employee retention and supporting internal growth so that all employees see a future for themselves in the Rush system.

This innovation story was made possible through funding from The James Irvine Foundation