How many times have you, as a guest, been disappointed, unsatisfied or even frustrated by a service during your stay or visit to a hotel? How can senior leadership in hotels start motivating their staff to achieve a high guest satisfaction level? Below are six steps that once applied, will change the way staff perceive and perform quality in their work areas.
Create a Strategic Vision
Hotel leadership has to create a clear vision that promotes quality. Making quality a strategic priority for everyone in the team is the backbone of success. The vision has to include a mission statement that shows importance of quality in the hotel. Jack Welch once said: “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion”.
Most hotel leaders aim for quality but few can articulate it, explain it, or implement the tools to drive it. You and your senior team need to sit together, brain storm and create the vision and its strategy. It is the first step in a successful process.
| Advertisement |
Set Specific Goals
Imagine the 100m sprint without a finish line. This occurs exactly when managers say: “We want to be the best, improve our quality and provide the best service to our guests” but without putting in place a single bench mark to measure the success.
You need to set the SMART goals, and communicate them to every single member of staff in the hotel. Staff need to be sufficiently familiar with these goals to the extent of knowing them by heart, and without the need to refer back to a chart or note pad. As it is always said: “Without having a goal, it is difficult to score”.
Explain and Train
Everyone knows about the shortage of truly talented people in the hotel industry. Hotels will always rely on young, inexperienced staff that need training and development. Leaders should make sure that training dollars make sense and not pennies. They must ensure that training in the hotel is a main pillar and not just a secondary task. In addition to this, it is paramount that there is a major emphasis not only on technical skills, but on what quality means, especially from the guest’s perspective. Staff need to know how they can achieve this quality and how to translate it into actions.
Communicate More
You need to communicate more often about quality and standards and relate it at all times to business. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, speaks about the concept of the Stickiness Factor, where repeating the message over and over again makes it very clear and sticks in people’s minds. This is exactly what companies do with advertising and how infant television programmes such as Baby Einsteins work. This will allow the concept to stick in the staff’s mind and it will become a habit rather than an obligation.
Be present and visible
“You can’t lead with your feet on the desk” — an important statement and the title of Ed Fuller’s book, the former president and managing director of Marriott International. Ensure that you and your middle managers are on the floor, get engaged with them and show the staff a true example of what you expect. Being on the floor, you will not only connect you with your guests and build relationships with them, but more importantly, you will connect with your staff who are doing the very important job of taking care of your guests. Therefore, you will be leading by example.
Recognise and Celebrate Success
Goal is achieved? Woohoo! This is definately the time to celebrate. Make sure that staff are recognised for their efforts collectively and that they get something in return. You can organise any fun activity, maybe a cocktail reception, motivational emails and thank you notes etc. However, don’t wait for results to recognise individuals. You need to publicly recognise those who are going above and beyond their normal roles on a daily basis. By recognising the staff, it will most certainly motivate them and accentuate more positive behaviour.
About the Author:
Wael Maatouk is hotel manager at Ritz-Carlton Hotel Riyadh. He is shortlisted in the Hotelier Middle East Awards 2013 in the category of Hotel Manager /EAM of the Year.
Search our database of more than 2,700 industry companies
