|
is expeditious, but the clerk never acknowledges the customer or smiles (interpersonal failure), the guest may be dissatisfied with the service. If the guest gets the right key and the clerk is friendly, but the guest has to wait on line for ten minutes for a check-in that takes another five, the guest may be dissatisfied with the service. Thus, any failure to provide complete or timely service may lead to dissatisfaction on the part of the customer. Standards should be developed as an integral part of the service procedures. In fact, they are a natural outgrowth of developing procedures. They should be developed with employee involvement to ensure their complete understanding and acceptance. Once an organization has determined that guests should be greeted politely and expeditiously upon entering the restaurant, the organization must determine what behavior defines politeness and how long a customer will wait before service is no longer expeditious. Thus, organizations with which I have worked develop standards that address all aspects of the guest's experience with any area or individual in the property.
Well-developed standards define both completeness and timeliness in terms that are meaningful to customers and consistent with their needs.
Develop Human Resources
Developing human resources requires effective employee selection, training, and performance appraisal. As the available labor pool shrinks and the minimum wage goes up, the hard dollar cost of quality in terms of turnover and poorly trained employees will also rise.
Several years ago, in a meeting with the upper-management team of a fairly large hotel company, the topic at band was training. All the meeting participants agreed that the most-successful hotel companies invested in training and development. The vice president of operations pointed out that, unfortunately, his company couldn't afford the cost of training. Of course, one wonders how it could afford the cost of not training. Managers who don't have time for training don't have time for quality.
At the same time, improved training is not enough to ensure quality. Profiles of successful employees need to be developed to improve the screening process. Organizations need to develop career paths so that prospective employees see the opportunity for growth. While one may rightly admire those managers who worked their way up through the ranks, today's employees want to know more about where they can go with a company and what they have to do to get there.
The performance-appraisal process should either be overhauled or eliminated. Managers need to understand that regular feedback is far more important than an annual appraisal that depends on a series of highly subjective evaluations made by a manager who, in general, doesn't want to sit in judgment of the employee. Effective appraisals require regular feedback on job-specific responsibilities. They should reflect the organization's service standards and the specifics of its training programs.
Over the years I have seen numerous properties with various well-developed components of the training and appraisal process. Rarely, however, have the tools and methods been integrated. A good "certification checklist" isn't supported by well-defined procedures. Effective service procedures aren't integrated in the training process. And I virtually never find that the performance appraisal includes specific job skills.
I once did some work at a resort in Colorado where business was highly seasonal, as it is at many comparable properties. Each year, dozens of employees were hired at the beginning of the season—in this case, October. Inevitably, the first month proved to be a shakedown period and the property generally needed some two months for things to settle down. Employee frustra tion (and turnover) was always high, as was customer dissatisfaction (evidenced in part by allowances). Once training tools were developed and a training system put in place, however, the property was able to gear up in two to three weeks and was better prepared than it had ever been for the season.
|
The key is to coordinate the processes and tools so that training and appraisal ensure a consistency of focus. Effective human-resource development requires integrated tools and systems that start with the selection process and lead through to the appraisal process.
Plan for Quality
More and more organizations are forecasting business volumes for the short term. However, many of the organizations make little if any effort actually to determine the precise impact of the forecast on customer expectations and staffing needs. Essentially, once a forecast is completed, it is translated into "slow," "average," or "busy" and managers staff accordingly.
This is not an effective means of ensuring quality. A competent forecasting and planning system requires that management take a close look at the coming week. Will there be early check-ins, late check-outs? Will there be a large function with simultaneous check-ins to tax the capacity of the front desk? Should coffee and soda be put in the lobby so that the wait for check-in is less annoying? Should all transient guests be pre-keyed? Is more business expected than the restaurant can handle? How can long lines in the restaurant be avoided?
It is common for managers to review function sheets at staff meetings. For most, this is a tiresome repetition of who has planned what events.
Unfortunately, it is rare to see a management group actually consider the impact of the various circumstances on the operating departments and make plans to deal with the possible contingencies. The typical admonition for a busy day is "Do your best" and for a slow day it's "Watch your labor cost."
Equally problematic is the failure of organizations to understand that the weekly work schedule is essential to careful planning. Staff shortages lead to overworked and harried employees, while overstaffing generally leads to people standing around and fighting off boredom. There is a general belief that scheduling is an art. It isn't. It may not be a science, but it is an objective process and an acquired skill. Effective scheduling involves matching the needs of the customer to the availability of employees. To do this, managers need to be trained to understand the specific relationship between demand and resource availability. It's easy to schedule housekeepers if you know that they can clean 16 rooms a day. It is equally important to know how many desk clerks you need given a standard of 3 minutes per check-in.
When properties have developed planning systems that tie their forecasts to employee schedules and guest needs, they find that less time is spent scrambling to recover and more time is spent serving the guest. A carefully developed schedule, based on service standards, is the only way to maintain the desired quality on a consistent basis.
Build Systems to Measure Achievement
Historically, hospitality organizations primarily have used only two regular tools to measure performance: the profit-and-loss statement and guest-comment cards. While the bottom line clearly defines success, survival, or failure, it is, at best, of only marginal use as a problem-solving tool for operational managers. And while guest-comment cards tell you what 3 to 5 percent of your customers think of your service, they are not a particularly effective measurement tool for operations. Effective measurement tools specifically measure on a regular, if not daily, basis how well the organization is achieving its standards.
In all the literature one can read on quality management, there is one thing on which the acknowledged experts agree: measurement is essential. Yet, in bur industry, the consensus seems to be that there's too much measurement. The problem, apparently, is that most of the measuring in which managers are involved is financial and provides them with little immediately applicable information.
|
