Among all the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic created for the hotel industry, determining layoffs and furloughs of employees was among the toughest for hoteliers. A further complication was determining what support those still on the job would need.

As part of a "ForWard Thinking: Women at Top" webinar series presented by the American Hotel & Lodging Association on Monday, Simone Wu, senior vice president, general counsel, corporate secretary and external affairs at Choice Hotels International, said her company has tried to up its communication to help with restructuring its people.

"There’s no more difficult decision than those that impact people," she said. "This past year has been hard on this industry, it’s been hard on our people, hard on our companies … and we’ve all had to tighten our belts.

"We’ve all had to impact people we care about knowing that impacts their families, knowing that it impacts their community, and the way that I’ve tried to do this is to be as thoughtful as possible, to heighten the communication, the support for each other. To increase the cadence of our conversations."

While Choice is currently communicating with its employees via Zoom, Wu said she's increasing the opportunities to talk "not only about business topics of the day, but how we're doing."

Choice asks its corporate team members how they are doing and what flexibility they might need to help them get through these challenging times, she said.

The hotel industry and the world as a whole was dealt a health crisis, an economic crisis and a social justice crisis all in one year, which has put a huge strain on mental health, said Malaika Myers, chief human resources officer at Hyatt Hotels Corp.

These are all large sources of stress, anxiety, fear and anger, and everyone has been trying to deal with them as these crises have hit at one time, she said.

"The mental health for women and men in the workplace has been on our radar in a really big way, because you add all of that to the fact that we’ve had to reduce our staff, and we do have people who are doing more than what they were doing before," she said.

To help employees balance work and personal life stressors, Hyatt launched a mental health assessment tool to help its employees keep track of how they are feeling to give them tools to help manage stress, Myers said.

The company also put "do not disturb" days in place to give people time to do things they can control and do the things they think are most important, she said.

"The idea of monitoring your own mental health has got to be high on people’s agenda," she said.

Joy Rothschild, chief human resources officer at Omni Hotels & Resorts, said in the midst of having to furlough some employees, her company realized it wasn't doing a good job of "taking care of the people who were staying."

The company learned through internal surveys employees were feeling overwhelmed and felt like they couldn't take a vacation day, she said.

To fix this, Rothschild said Omni gave people more time to use their paid time off rather than saying they only have a certain amount of time to use it, which gave people a sigh of relief.

Omni has also provided flexibility in the workplace. She said its offices have been open since May, but some people want to work in the office while others don't feel comfortable, which is why the company adopted the mantra of "we'll meet you where you are."

"The industry is going to need to be more flexible," she said.

When asked by moderator Chip Rogers, president and CEO of AHLA, if her company would ever go back to how it looked in 2019, Heather McCrory, CEO of North and Central America at Accor, said, "Frankly, I don't think so."

"I believe one of the silver linings of this pandemic is the fact that it’s actually proven that we can all be quite productive when we’re at home," she said. "That provides phenomenal flexibility for women with children. I think it’s so much easier for them to not have to do that commute and be at home, or women ... that would actually like to be at work and have some quiet time from the family."

Her company is no longer concerned about what employees are doing wherever they are. The ability to work from home or from other destinations "is a tremendous asset to our industry," she said.

While flexibility is important and needed, she said there's still a need to gather together with teams, because that's where people build relationships.

To balance working remotely for employees with coming together in the office, McCrory said her company is considering a schedule where employees might work in the office three or so days a week and work from home the rest of the time.