Translating Strategy Into Hr Policies & Practices Case

The Hotel Paris’s 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. As she reviewed her company’s training processes, Lisa had re asons to be concerned.

For one thing, the Hotel Paris relied almost exclusively on informal on-the-job training.

New security guards attended a 1-week program offered by a law enforcement agency,but all other new hires, from assistant manager to housekeeping crew, learned the rudiments of their jobs from their colleagues and their supervisors, on the job. Lisa noted that the drawbacks of this informality were evident when she compared the Hotel Paris’s performance on various training metrics with those of other hotels and service firms. For example, in terms of number of hours training per employee per year,number of hours training for new employees, cost per trainee hour, and percent of payroll spent on training, the Hotel Paris was far from the norm when benchmarked against similar firms.

Similar firms offered at least 40 hours of training per new employee, while the Hotel Paris offered, at most, 10. Even the apparently “good” metrics comparisons simply masked poor results. For example, whereas most service firms spend about 8%of their payrolls on training, the Hotel Paris spent less than 1%. The problem, of course, was that the Hotel Paris’s training was nonexistent. Given this and the common sense links between (1) employee training and (2) employee performance, the CFO gave his go-ahead for Lisa and her team to design a comprehensive package of training programs for all Hotel Paris employees.