July 26, 2002 Bringing Claridge's Into The 21st Century Creating New Vision and Management Style Written By: Gene Ference  Ph.D. Specialists in Organizational Assessments and Performance Cultures Here is an interesting challenge: take traditional legendary service of a world-renowned, European hotel and introduce change to implement a continuous improvement, team-based, modern service culture. Top-tier hoteliers the world over recognize that beating the competition depends on meeting and exceeding guest expectations; they also recognize that the ability to beat out the competition depends a great deal on having peak-performing employees and teams. The executive team at Claridge’s in London is no different in recognizing this, and faced exactly the challenge mentioned. The hotel was established in 1812 and by 1898 became the Claridge’s we recognize today. This legendary hotel, impossible to replicate today, has for over 100 years been providing world-renowned hospitality service to crowned and elected heads of state, senior state officials, leading business people, and the most discriminating leisure guests. To keeping up with the expectations of their guests, by the 1990’s the hotel was undergoing transformations and restorations to a number of its showpiece accommodations. The restorations and transformations Claridge’s was making were telling signs of what was happening beneath the surface. Meeting and exceeding guest expectations lay in Claridge’s ability to increase the competitiveness of its value network: the systems, processes, decision model, and organization of a company that contribute to product desirability. The value network begins and ends with the expectations of the customer, but its success depends on effective and consistent service-performance and guest-responsive teams. Thus, the challenge for the executive team at Claridge’s: Develop a mission necessary for peak service-performance based on existing organizational fundamentals. Implement a performance tool that measures how well goals are aligned, and facilitates a team workplace. Enter Gene Ference, PhD, and HVS/The Ference Group & The Center For Survey Research. The tool of choice: the Service-Culture MapTM – a powerful process that involves periodic employee and customer surveys, with continuous improvement as its central theme leading to real organizational peak performance. On-going and continuous, the map’s four phase, ten-step process moves an organization from competitive strategy (Phase I) to in-depth service-operational insight (Phase II) to performance monitoring, feedback, teambuilding, organization-wide goal alignment (Phase III), and ultimately to a uniquely focused peak performing culture (Phase IV). The cornerstones to enhance traditional Claridge’s renowned service were jointly laid by the executive team headed by newly appointed general manager Christopher Cowdray and Gene Ference. Based on Claridge’s organizational fundamentals, themes of the mission statement centered on leveraging the hotel’s long history, equating excellence with perfection, acknowledging that the expectations of guests, owners, and employees are equally important, and making cross-functional teams the pinnacle of a competitive value network. From the mission, a performance appraisal was created and designed to work in tandem with survey results. Key elements to the revamped appraisal process included benchmarking performance, a goal factor that aims at aligning performance standards organization-wide, and teamwork and communication skills. The twist: from start to finish, the appraisal is interactive. Having employee and appraiser complete sections individually forms the basis for discussion at the appraisal meeting and facilitates a meeting of minds. The scope and depth of the reports generated from the survey results prepared executives and managers with the keys required for successful service-performance by providing accurate, real-time snapshots of employees’ perceptions of the value network. Claridge’s magnified the power of the Service-Culture MapTM  with repeated survey administrations. The first survey administration set the baseline; the second survey established a comparative database identifying the direction; the third survey identified trends within departments, divisions, and property. Through data analysis, a set of significant impact statements was identified: a concentrated grouping of survey statements with statistically significantly impact on performance and satisfaction, and when taken together provide the executive team and management an effective guide to developing a management style most appropriate for an organization. Significant impact statements are calculated from (1) drivers: greatest mean differences is survey statement score between departments with an increase in score to those with a decrease in score (2) significant impact statements: survey statements that correlate strongly with 30 or more other survey statements. For Claridge’s, the significant impact statements represented 11% of all survey statements and effected 80% of the variation in survey results, i.e., the variation between instances of high or low score. These statements included topics such as (in rank order): Senior management understanding of the front-line work environment. Mid-manager job competence. Balance on emphasis between quality of service and profit. Manager objectivity and honesty in providing feedback and information to and about employees. Openness and approachability of the executive team. Continuous and frequent performance feedback and recognition of special efforts made by employees. Supervisor adequately training employees for the level of expected performance. Another useful data analysis technique built into the survey is the grouping of survey statements into organizational dimensions: clusters of related of survey statements through which operational insight is gained and management can monitor and implement strategies and objectives. Dimension analysis enabled Claridge’s executive team and management to focus on activities that are central to the organization’s culture, and to enhance team dynamics and guest-responsive service. When ranked, the dimensions that consistently score highest for Claridge’s are “Quality of Products and Services,” “Training and Career Development,” and “Mid-Management Practices.” Companies want to attain consistent and high proficiency in such areas and may see them as integral to an effective operation. However, what makes these findings stand out for Claridge’s is that when taken together, the content of each dimension relates directly back to the mission, and to the intent of the interactive performance appraisal. For Claridge’s, the trend of increasing scores in these dimensions equates to increasing culture alignment. Analysis of survey results by dimension also serves as a barometer for the executive team. By enabling them to monitor the development and phasing-in of competencies necessary for future service-performance success, Claridge’s executive team has significantly improved in critical areas such as leadership, participative/supportive management style, communications, and teamwork. Monitoring the development and phasing-in of competencies is only a part of strategic thinking. Remember our challenge: take the already legendary service of a world-renowned hotel and turn it around to implement a continuous improvement, team-based, service culture. In every turnaround story there is a group that performs above the average. Another part of strategic thinking is uncovering high-performance groups and transferring their knowledge across the organization. Because development and phasing-in of competencies is a long-term strategic goal, redirecting the data analysis to focus on results by division makes sense. To be sure, the depth and flexibility of the survey design itself made possible such an analysis. The data were grouped by division, an average score for each survey statement by overall results was then computed, and 95% confidence intervals were constructed by survey statement and division results. Next, we identified differences in the various divisions’ performance, and, indeed, discovered a division that by the second survey administration was outpacing all other divisions, despite performance improvement for Claridge’s across the board. The obvious question, “What caused this division to outpace all other divisions?” will be the subject of our follow-up article, Fueling High Performance Teams.  Gene Ference, Ph.D.  HVS International/The Ference Group  Riversbend 262 Lyons Plain Road  Weston, CT 06883  203.226.6000  203.221.0068 fax gference@hvs.com www.ferencegroup.com	About the Author: Gene Ference, Ph.D., is president and founder of HVS/The Ference Group and The Center for Survey Research, specializing in organizational development through executive retreats, organizational surveys and the nurturing of service cultures for the hospitality industry. Gene Ference, Ph.D.  HVS International/The Ference Group  Riversbend 262 Lyons Plain Road  Weston, CT 06883  203.226.6000  203.221.0068 fax gference@hvs.com www.ferencegroup.com
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