Collins Mwizende Peru, group HR manager at PrideInn Hotels, Resorts and Camps, reflects on the lessons that shaped his career and how fair pay and clear policies helped reduce staff turnover at Muthaiga Golf Club from 43 to 13 percent. He started his career running a public phone booth in Nairobi’s CBD to earn bus fare, encountered city council lorries along the way and explains why the best HR training he ever received came without a certificate.
When Collins Mwizende Peru, the group HR manager at PrideInn Hotels joined Muthaiga Golf Club, staff turnover stood at 43 percent. Six years later, it had fallen to 13 percent. The group HR manager at PrideInn Hotels, Resorts and Camps attributes the shift not to a single intervention but to getting the fundamentals right and applying them consistently.
“This was through fair pay, clear policies, open communication and a willingness to listen to staff and act on their concerns. People often ask for the secret. Honestly, there wasn't one. It was six years of doing simple things consistently,” he says.
When Collins arrived at Muthaiga, club members could hire and dismiss staff without a consistent, formal process. There was no protection, process or fairness. Before any engagement programme or recognition initiative could mean anything, that had to change.
“With proper procedures in place, nobody could be hired or fired on a whim. Feeling safe in your job is the cheapest retention tool there is,” he says.
The second priority was pay. Salaries for similar roles had become inconsistent over the years, so Collins set about harmonising them.
“Few things undermine morale faster than discovering that a new colleague earns more for doing the same job. For me, fair and consistent pay was not a reward but a basic requirement for retaining staff,” he emphasises.
The third was communication. Staff were hearing news from the canteen before they heard it from management. Collins introduced regular town halls and clear feedback channels so that information moved in the right direction.
“I also ran Muthaiga’s first-ever staff engagement survey and shared the results openly, building the action plan around what staff had actually said. It would have been easy to file the results away, but instead, we used their feedback to shape our plan,” he recalls.
Recognition also played a role in building a sense of belonging. Staff appreciation events, awards for outstanding work and team-building activities gave employees a reason to feel valued beyond their pay and the policies governing their work. Collins traces this lesson to his first employer, Small Star Restaurant on River Road, where the late Mr Nahashon Ajuoga would gather the entire team whenever a pay increase was approved and announce it like a national budget speech. Even a raise of 50 shillings would send the room into an eruption of excitement.
“He never just paid us more. He made sure we knew we were valued. Years later, I still tell managers that recognition is not about the size of the reward but how you deliver it,” he says.
The fifth element, and the one Collins says made everything else possible, was getting managers on board. None of the policies, surveys or recognition programmes work if the person running the shift does not believe in them. Once supervisors at Muthaiga saw that a happy team made their own jobs easier, the culture began to change from the inside.
He closes his account of the six years with the line he now uses whenever he is explaining HR systems to a room of managers.
“An HR system works when the waiter understands it and the chairman respects it. If you only have one of the two, you don’t have a system; you just have a document. I have carried those same principles into my cluster HR role at Villa Rosa Kempinski and Olare Mara Kempinski, and now into PrideInn Hotels, Resorts and Camps, where I lead HR across eight properties and related businesses. The scope is wider, but the principles are the same,” he says.
