Diversity, inclusion and empowering female leadership
Adriana Echandi: “Our culture has always been customer first, innovation first”
Inclusion and diversity sit at the heart of the company’s values, as we discovered on our recent visit to Morpho Travel Experience.
Of the management team, 50% are women. But, as CEO Adriana Echandi notes, this was far from a box-ticking, quote-filling exercise. “We do believe in gender balance but here it just happened organically. That shows it is part of our culture.” Equal pay across all income brackets and roles is also the norm. An Inclusion Programme helps to develop recruitment strategies that are inclusive of all, regardless of age, disability, sexual orientation and expression.
Ensuring that people can see a career path and can grow inside the organisation is a central feature of the recruitment and retention plan. Not all of the senior management team have worked at Morpho right from the start like Echandi but most have been there for 14, 16, 18 years and have grown in expertise and confidence as the group itself has expanded.
The heartbeat of the company at Corteza
A visit to Morpho Travel Experience HQ, which it shares with sister company Café Britt, showed us how a close-knit senior team works alongside young talent coming through the ranks, in departments from design to logistics.
That growth from within reflects well on Morpho’s drive to recruit homegrown talent, as well as on Costa Rica’s education system; its hires are local, highly skilled and most speak English to an astonishingly proficient degree.
The natural Costa Rican openness and hospitality to guests helps too, as does the absence of a heavily tiered structure dividing people in the organisation. There are no administrative assistants or secretaries, the leaders sit with their teams, and importantly, decisions are made fast without needing committee approval. The collaborative style of management, with women leading much of the decision making, plays an important role here too.
Morpho has a strong track record of nurturing people from within, empowering and promoting individuals regardless of background or belief
Of the company culture, Adriana Echandi says: “Our culture has always been customer first, innovation first, and to try things and be daring without the fear of messing up. In Costa Rica that is part of the culture too. You see very little hierarchy in society or in companies, unlike in other countries.
“Some colleagues overseas don’t understand this – maybe they expect their own office, a driver or other things that fit their senior status – but then they don’t stay with us very long either. Most people who work here ‘get it’ and accept that this is a positive way of working.”
On what it takes to become a success at Morpho, Echandi says: “Nearly everyone started on the shop floor. They seem to like the environment, and have grown their careers from there, whether they began on the shop floor or the warehouse. What is important is that whatever country you are in, that you are proud to show off that country and its highlights. That joy is a key element of our culture at all levels.”
The company’s ‘For the People’ ethos represents a core element in its strategy and one pillar under its support for the United Nations Global Compact.
In Costa Rica, initiatives include supporting workers and ambassadors that come from impoverished backgrounds, and of course, buying from less well-off communities.
In food, Morpho aims to go local (as well as healthy) in its sourcing, with many women farmers from the Central Valley of Costa Rica as suppliers.
Similarly, the company supports the families of its staff and partners: it has helped in the education of over 5,200 children in Costa Rica by providing them with bilingual textbooks.
Seven years ago, Morpho also founded a ‘Corporate University’ that promotes education and professional development among its ambassadors.
August 2023