Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

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СКАЧАТЬ encouraged workers to use strategies of deep acting to induce real feeling for guests.²¹ Much like trainers at the airlines Hochschild studied, managers told workers to “act like the hotel is your house” and to “pretend the [complaining] guest is a relative, so there's still a sense of caring.” This approach promotes deferential behavior “by invoking a familiar situation in which such behavior does not imply subservience.”²² Alice also told workers to “think about the hotel as if it were your business” when trying to solve a problem.

      Managers also suggested that making the guest feel better would benefit the worker herself. One video Alice showed in the orientation included a scene in which a worker relates to another worker a story (supposedly true) about a guest who arrived upset and treated the worker rudely. Although she was already having a bad day, the worker went out of her way for the guest, because she realized that he had been traveling for a long time and was tired. Afterward she felt good about having made the extra effort. At the end of the scene, her coworker comments, “So I guess by making his day, you made your day as well.” This video and other stories communicated that workers have to make allowances for people, because one never knows what has happened to them, and that the worker has the power to make someone feel better, which will benefit her psychologically too.

      Training also focused on specific ways to handle guest needs and complaints, which gave workers resources as well as standards to which they would be held accountable. In the orientation, we played the “customer service pyramid game,” for example, in which workers answered questions in nine categories of customer service (“Who ya gonna call?” “Service with a smile,” “Anticipation,” and so on). Alice showed a video that emphasized the importance of meeting the guest's needs in different interactive jobs. We also had training on guest complaints, which included statistics about repeat clients, psychological interpretations of guests’ underlying desires in situations when they complained, extensive role playing of unhappy guests, and five steps to handling guest complaints (“Don't interrupt,” “Apologize first,” “Identify the problem,” “Take immediate action,” and “Follow up”). This part of the training also included an animated video entitled A Complaint Is a Gift.²³

      The hotel also used more specific service standards developed at the company's head office, known as Celebrated Quality Standards (CQS). Binders containing dozens of standards were kept in each department. These included very specific ways of doing tasks in each department in the hotel, such as how many minutes it should take for the guest to check in (five) or when the worker should acknowledge the approaching guest (when he is fifteen feet away). These were not routines in the strictest sense, at least for interactive workers, because the workers had discretion about when to use them. But they were a sophisticated attempt to codify as many of the hotel's practices as possible. This program was accompanied by the Celebrated Standards Training, or CST. Alice told new workers that the CQS and the CST had been developed in order to maintain the high level of service “on so many continents.”

      TRAINING ON THE JOB Despite these elaborate standards, corporate culture was often more a matter of image than of practice. Training on the job was less elaborate than I had expected, given the emphasis on standards during the orientation. My own training from managers was somewhat spotty. When I first started, Antonio gave me a packet that included many of the relevant standards, but no one ever reviewed them with me. Training was inconsistent for other workers as well. Several workers told me they had simply been thrown into their jobs. Carolyn, Elena, and Patsy told me they had never been trained on the hotel's standards; Javier, a bellman who had been at the hotel for over a year, did not know that the red dot on the guest's key envelope indicated that the guest was a repeat. Max, who had helped to develop the guidelines, said, “No one ever uses them.”

      However, it was also clear that many workers had been trained very well, which may have depended on what department they were in and how long they had been with the hotel (those workers who had been through the original CQS “rollout” a few years before were more familiar with the standards). Luxury Garden workers seemed to get far fewer write-ups than those at the Royal Court, where discipline was used in place of training. Also, some attention was paid to ongoing training. During my time at the Luxury Garden, in addition to a two-day “etiquette training,” concierges, bellmen, and front desk agents attended a “guest services training,” the first in what François said might become a series. Managers also attended a training after which they had to solicit feedback from workers on topics such as recognition, career goals, and optimal working conditions.

      IMPLEMENTING NEW STANDARDS Corporate culture's multiple functions—promoting community and loyalty, demonstrating the impressiveness of the company, and establishing legitimate managerial authority and worker accountability—were illuminated in the “rollout” of a corporate-led initiative to modify the company's standards. The program, called Celebrated Quality Experience (CQE), was kicked off in a hotelwide meeting led by Sebastian, the general manager, about halfway through my time at the hotel. Workers gathered in a large meeting room decorated with yellow and red helium balloons and posters proclaiming the CQE. Before the meeting, workers were given numbered tickets. After calling workers to order, Sebastian said, “Those of you who know me know I like to give money away.” He drew a number and gave an envelope with fifty dollars in it to the housekeeping worker who waved the corresponding ticket as a human resources manager snapped their picture.

      Sebastian used a slick PowerPoint presentation to introduce the new program. He said that the CQS was becoming the CQE, a shift from over 1,000 “standards” to 175 “experiences.” He explained that the very specific Celebrated Quality Standards had proven unwieldy, because the company's various properties had constantly requested certain kinds of exemptions, needed because of the particular circumstances of each hotel. The U.S. properties, for example, could not implement standards that required excessive amounts of labor, which was much more expensive here than in Asia. The new standards would allow flexibility while retaining consistency among all the Luxury Garden properties worldwide. Sebastian said they also permitted a greater focus on interactions with guests, were more concise, and allowed each Luxury Garden property to “express its uniqueness.” Although workers were encouraged to retain specific standards appropriate to their work areas, the shift was toward the use of general core standards rather than specific routines. This shift also demonstrates the flexibility needed to provide the “experience” characteristic of luxury service.

      Sebastian detailed the process by which corporate management had arrived at these standards via the creation of a task force; like Alice's portrayal of the development of the hotel's credo, this approach centered on creating a common history and identity. He introduced the “eight mantras” of the new approach. He talked about the time line for implementing the new standards and how they would be measured by the mystery shopper company the Luxury Garden used. Finally, he talked about how management would “keep it alive” through continued training and visuals posted around the hotel. He concluded the presentation by saying that the CQE “will become a heart of our culture; it's what we do, what we're about,” and that we should “incorporate it into our daily lives.” The meeting ended with Sebastian asking simple questions recapping what he had said; workers who raised their hands and answered correctly received twenty dollars. On our way out we were each given a newly reprinted credo card that included the eight mantras.

      This introduction was followed by “train the trainer” sessions, in which Alice helped workers designated as departmental trainers to understand the program and the implementation process. I attended two of these sessions (lasting one and four hours), which featured professional-looking binders filled with training materials about facilitation, learning styles, lesson plans, and evaluation. Of the more than twenty employees who participated in these two sessions, at least fifteen were managers, both high- and midlevel, demonstrating that, in fact, managers would be primarily responsible for the training (in contrast to the rhetoric about worker trainers). Most workers who had been chosen were clearly of the more professionalized and committed variety. During the training, Alice laid out a time line for the updating of manuals and training СКАЧАТЬ