Background
The owners and management of a mid-sized hotel in San Antonio, Texas, face severe criticism from their customers. The reason is terrible guest service and incompetent employees. As a strategic leader responsible for this hospitality facility, I decided to reopen with a complete replacement of the guest service staff. The formal reason for the reopening was lifting the state of emergency in the United States.
Plan
Many procedures need to be carried out to reorganize the staff in the hotel effectively. Customer reviews collected, analyzed, and summarized by the vice president of customer relations show that the central problem is incompetent guest service workers. Judging by the numerous and varied complaints, a significant part of this staff category must be replaced. However, this would inevitably affect the functioning of the business entity.
In order to carry out a complete reorganization of the guest service team and not to frustrate the customers even more with the missing number of employees, a pause would be taken for reopening. The meta-goal is to “come out from this crisis more efficient and resilient” (Yoong, n.d., para. 8). Methodologically, it was chosen to follow “three steps in a quality control” (Shewhart, 2012, p. 1). Therefore, the specification of what is desired has been completed.
Do
The implementation of the plan for updating the customer service staff has three stages, which are evaluation, execution, and adjustment. The first action is an employee competency assessment, and a group of the most motivated core employees is then formed based on its results. They will ensure the functioning of the hotel in the future and will become informal mentors and mental support for new employees. The rest who fail the assessment will be offered dismissal or all-encompassing skill training.
The execution stage begins and lasts a little over two months. This duration is due to the need to avoid lawsuits from massively laid-off former workers (Corrigan, 2022). These are common and costly occurrences if employers do not strictly follow American termination laws.
Human resource hotel specialists pay special attention to the ethics and motivation of recruits. Their task is to find professionals with similar ethics and views on the performance of job duties and problem-solving. The adjustment stage includes such procedures as changing the hotel’s corporate ethics, vision, and mission.
Check
A month after the reopening, in the second part of the plan, the effectiveness of the partial reorganization intervention is checked. The evaluation procedures are employee competency assessment and guest feedback thematic analysis. Consumer feedback is a very revealing type of quality information (The benefits of guest feedback, n.d.).
Higher positive numerical and qualitative indicators in the received data mean the staff replacement was successful. Expected outcomes are increased customer satisfaction with guest services and a comparatively better understanding of job responsibilities, hospitality industry ethics, and professional skills. A fundamental gap is an inability to assess whether customer service in the hotel has improved compared to other industry actors.
Act
The final stage of the cycle allows one to take substantial action and make the desired comparison across the industry. Further, employee competency assessments are conducted across other hotel teams to identify underperformance, core employees, and opportunities for improvement. A similar reorganization is carried out gradually in one group after another to become the most famous four-star hotel with exceptional service in San Antonio.
References
Corrigan, J. (2022). Dangers of mass layoffs: Protect your company from lawsuits. HRD America. Web.
Shewhart, W. A. (2012). Statistical method from the viewpoint of quality control. Dover Publications.
The benefits of guest feedback in the hospitality industry. (n.d.). Social Hospitality. Web.
Yoong, K. (n.d.). Reopening hotels: How to recover and get it right. EHL Insights. Web.