THE HOTEL PARIS CASE
The New Career Management System
The Hotel Paris competitive strategy is to use
superior guest service to differentiate the Hotel
Paris properties, and to thereby increase the
length of stay and return rate of guests, and thus
boost revenues and profitability. HR manager
Lisa Cruz must now formulate functional
policies and activities that support this
competitive strategy by eliciting the required
employee behaviors and competencies.
Lisa Cruz knew that as a hospitality business,
the Hotel Paris was uniquely dependent upon
having committed, high-morale employees. In a
factory or small retail shop, the employer might
be able to rely on direct supervision to make
sure that the employees were doing their jobs.
But in a hotel, just about every employee is on
the front line. There is usually no one there to
supervise the limousine driver when he or she
picks up a guest at the airport, or when the valet
takes the guest’s car, or the front-desk clerk
signs the guest in, or the housekeeping clerk
needs to handle a guest’s special request. If the
hotel wanted satisfied guests, they had to have
committed employees who did their jobs as if
they owned the company, even when the
supervisor was nowhere in sight. But for the
employees to be committed, Lisa knew the
Hotel Paris had to make it clear that the
company was also committed to its employees.
From her experience, she knew that one way to
do this was to help her employees have
successful and satisfying careers, and she was
therefore concerned to find that the Hotel Paris
had no career management process at all.
Supervisors weren’t trained to discuss
employees’ developmental needs or promotional
options during the performance appraisal
interviews. Promotional processes were
informal. And the firm did not attempt to
provide any career development services that
might help its employees to develop a better
understanding of what their career options were,
or should be. Lisa was sure that committed
employees were the key to improving the
experiences of its guests, and that she couldn’t
boost employee commitment without doing a
better job of attending to her employees’ career
needs.
For Lisa and the CFO, preliminary research left
little doubt about the advisability of instituting a
new career management system at the Hotel
Paris. The CFO therefore gave the go-ahead to
design and institute a new Hotel Paris career
management program. Lisa and her team knew
that they already had some of the building
blocks in place, thanks to the new performance
management system they had instituted just a
few weeks earlier.
For example, the new performance management
system required that the supervisor appraise the
employee based on goals and competencies that
were driven by the company’s strategic needs,
and the appraisal itself produced new goals for
the coming year and specific development plans
for the employee.
Questions
1. Many hotel jobs are inherently dead end; for
example, maids, laundry workers, and valets
either have no great aspirations to move up, or
are just using these jobs temporarily, for
instance, to help out with household expenses.
First, do you agree with this statement why, or
why not? Second, list three specific career
activities you would recommend Lisa
implement for these employees.
2. Build on the company’s current performance
management system by recommending two
other specific career development activities the
hotel should implement.
