Ian Graham, Director, The Hotel Solutions Partnership Ltd This book should be on the desk of every hotel manager. I highly recommend this book as it will definitely be a useful resource as you try to run a great hotel. The guidance provided throughout this book is the culmination of my past 20 years of management and consulting in the hospitality industry.
It is these four themes that drive excellence and will serve as the framework for this book. And that's the key, everything covered in this book can be tailored to meet your specific needs - you will adapt, not adopt, based on your own specific circumstances.
DEFINE DIRECTION Define a clear direction for your hotel
A strategic map gives you the framework you need to excel and achieve lasting business success. Your strategic map creates a context for everything you do and forms the basis for every decision you make. Creating your strategic map requires you to focus entirely on the stakeholders and every hotel has different stakeholders.
It is this interconnectedness of stakeholder needs that forms the rationale for building your strategic map and underpins the journey to excellence. It is important to emphasize again at this stage that your strategic map will not be written in stone. Even if you are forced to make adjustments, at least do so in light of your strategic map, which is a much more logical approach than arbitrary, impulsive decision-making.
In Chapter 2, we'll explore what you need to do to put your strategy map into practice. So, if your hotel is in the early stages of development, creating a strategy map should be your priority.
SUMMARY
LEAD TO SUCCEED
Only through effective leadership can you get the best out of your employees and deal comfortably with the variety of people and issues you face every day. In the next chapter, we explore how you can increase the effectiveness of leadership in practice. Before you can improve the quality of leadership in the hotel, you need to create a general context for it.
You create this context when you prepare your mission statement, because it is here that you broadly describe what you are trying to achieve as a leader. At the heart of this is being competent at what you do, and it goes without saying that you need to know the tasks you expect others to undertake. Being competent is the need to be knowledgeable about aspects of the work your employees do.
Finally, you must be consistent in this area, both in your own behavior and in the direction you offer your employees. To begin with, you must be concerned about others if you want to be an effective leader. Only by showing care for your employees can you develop trust, come across as approachable and build relationships.
If you truly view your people as stakeholders, you must realize that they need to know what is going on in the hotel. Without the ability to "reach others", you can never hope to lead them in the direction you want them to go. It goes without saying that you should always know what you are talking about.
It has less impact if you don't make eye contact at the same time. So, spend the necessary time to identify what you need to do to improve how you communicate. Being willing to involve your employees does take courage, but it is the most logical approach if you truly believe that they are stakeholders in your hotel.
Do you regularly acknowledge your employees' efforts and give them credit when it's warranted? So you should also consider how you can get their feedback on this aspect of work life.
ENGAGE YOUR EMPLOYEES Bring the best out of your employees
Employee engagement is primarily about improving the performance of your employees to maximize the contribution they make, individually and collectively, to the company. When trying to determine how to engage your employees more fully, there is a long list of things to consider. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, effective leadership will be central to your efforts to engage your employees.
If someone asked your employees what it is you are trying to achieve at your hotel, they would know. The second aspect of control to consider here is the extent to which your employees at the hotel are empowered. In the next chapter we will look at practical things you can do within each of these twelve areas to make a real impact on the levels of engagement seen in your employees and as a result the performance of your hotel.
So what concrete steps can you take to get your employees more involved in your hotel. Unless you apply the principles and practices we covered earlier, you can never hope to engage your employees at the level of our friendly chef. But all the strategies or planning in the world are of limited value unless you have a supportive culture at the hotel that engages your employees to the extent that they actively support you in achieving your goals.
You should also talk to your employees to get a sense of what their opinions are on this. Only with this holistic overview can you create an accurate picture of the culture in the hotel. Whatever the reasons, if you want to truly engage your employees, you can't avoid the issue of culture.
Knowing what you want your employees to do is a pretty basic requirement and most hotels now have specific job descriptions for every position in the hotel. Don't assume your employees are on the same wavelength as you when it comes to what their job entails and what results are expected. You can improve the competence of your employees only if you offer regular, structured and effective training in the hotel, which is always based on identified needs.
If you don't, you are essentially sending a subliminal message to your employees that they are unimportant. In the next chapter, we'll discuss how to measure employee engagement over time.
CAPTIVATE YOUR CUSTOMERS Strive for total customer focus
- HAVE YOU ACHIEVED LEVEL S?
- HAVE YOU ACHIEVED LEVEL S ; 1?
Guest: Actually, can I have a non-smoking room at the back of the hotel and, yes, a soft pillow. The only prerequisites for achieving S;1 are your desire to be the best in terms of the customer experience you provide and to have laid the groundwork by addressing the principles covered in the previous topics. Check-in will be completed in a friendly manner and they will be wished a pleasant stay.
Examples of common customer expectations for all elements of the web experience can be found in the Tools and Resources section at the end of the book. Exterior Your customers expect your hotel to be easy to find and when they get there, the exterior of the hotel will create a positive first impression. Check-in Your customers expect that their check-in will be handled efficiently, that they will feel welcome at the hotel and valued as a customer.
Concierge Your customers expect concierges to be polite, friendly and attentive to their needs. Restaurant Your customers expect the environment in the restaurant to be pleasant, the products offered to be good and the service to be personal and attentive. Room service Your customers expect that when they order room service, the order will arrive promptly and the quality and presentation of the food/beverage will be high.
Check-out Your customers expect their check-out to be efficient and to feel valued as a customer. Your customers expect their check-in to be efficient and to feel welcome. Whatever your service goals are, your goal will be to meet them 100 percent of the time.
To measure whether the experience you provide in a hotel actually meets your service goals and follows the service steps, you need to assess the quality of service delivery across all elements of the experience web. You can apply the same principles to all departments by having a self-assessment checklist for each element of the experience web. A complete mystery guest checklist for all Experience Web elements is available in the Tools and Resources section at the end of this book.
These criteria are an example of the type of feedback we might request from customers regarding the login component of an online experience. A complete set of suggested criteria for all areas is available in the Tools and Resources section at the end of the book.
MAKE IT HAPPEN
