Regional role model

Kempinski People Management Middle East & Africa regional director of training Karen Thorburn explains how an old hotel company is reinventing itself through a modern approach to staff development and assessment

How has the training culture at Kempinski evolved since you joined the company four years ago?

Training now is a really big focus with Kempinski. Three years ago we had a global training academy and there were only seven of us; last month we held a training academy just for the Middle East and Africa and we had 23 people. Each Kempinski property now has a training manager that answers to the general manager, so training has been elevated to being a business partner – it’s really seen as improving the quality of what we do.

What did the last training academy involve?

I oversee the Middle East and Africa so at the moment we have 13 properties and another three opening by the end of the year. All the training managers, training co-ordinators, assistant training managers and directors of training of these hotels came together and we actually put them through a formal training programme — a certificate for a workplace trainer and assessor. It’s an Australian accredited course recognised worldwide, which looks at developing training, delivering training programmes and assessing them, with a focus of assessing on the job so that people really do understand what is being taught to them.

We did that for seven days and then had three days going over all the new programmes we have introduced this year into Kempinski.

Can you give some examples of these internal programmes?

We started with the FISH! philosophy; we’ve developed a programme around its four basic principles, so really it’s just about people being there for each other, looking out for each other, making people’s day and choosing your attitude. And then we work on six people business modules focused on soft skills

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Everybody has briefings every day, and part of this is about making briefings ‘wow’. There are different focuses on different days and weeks, but it’s all around interpersonal skills, quality service and people, for example ‘today we’re going to focus on using people’s names’.

With the ‘wow’ briefings, it must be very important to get managers on board with Kempinski’s training culture?

Yes, definitely, managers are seen as coaches. We’ve done a couple of different programmes with the manager so we are getting them onside; they are there as coaches to mentor and guide their staff, they’re there to give them direction but they’re not there to yell and scream. We put them through a little book called One Minute Manager and so we’ve developed a programme around that on how to give people constructive feedback to get the most out of people.

How different is that from what you have seen in other hotel chains?

Kempinski is fairly innovative. We might be an old company but we are reinventing ourselves and really looking at what we are; and we’re focused on the idea that if people are happy and they’re happy in their job then of course they are going to do a better job at everything they do.

You mentioned three openings; how will you train the new teams?

We’ve actually opened three hotels this year: one in Soma Bay in Egypt; Bilila Lodge, an incredible five-star lodge in the middle of the Serengeti; and in Aqaba on the Red Sea in Jordan. And we’re going to open a hotel in Cairo, one in Doha and Emerald Palace, which is actually on Palm Jumeirah in Dubai.

Once the heads of department are in place I go and spend a week to two weeks with them and we go through the Kempinski history, philosophy, procedures and policies, teach them how to write policies and procedures for their different outlets and get their manuals organised. We also do philosophical things, such as focus on management style. They feel confident then that they’ve got a set of tools to move forward with.

When the team is board I go in with the training manager and it’s full-on for anything up to six weeks training all the team members.

At the same time, there’s other hotels that need training too; we have our Leading Hotels of the World audits, so we have to make sure we get up to 85%, if not more, on those as well.