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We Train to Please: Keeping the Guest Promise at Lowe's Hotels
March 19, 2008
By Holly Dolezalek
How do you live up to a brand promise? At Loews Hotels, a chain of luxury hotels based in New York with 18 properties in North America, in cities such as Miami Beach, Denver, and Las Vegas, the brand promise is to deliver a "four diamond and more" experience, and to "constantly look for ways to delight our guests." Loews has learned that training is a big part of living up to that promise.
Training at all levels focuses on how employees— whether you're a housekeeper, a bellman, or a marketing director—can help to deliver on that promise. With 8,000 line-level employees (housekeepers, bartenders, restaurant staff, for example) and 1,200 managers to keep up to speed, that's a big promise to keep. "It's about what we do for guests to make their experience memorable and make them want to come back to a Loews hotel," says Jenny Lucas, director of education and development for Loews.
This is a relatively new focus for the company, which has changed its systems in many ways in response. It starts with the training department. Training managers at Loews are more like knowledge managers. They don't spend much of their time on formal training; instead, they work in the departments and build relationships with the employees on the floor. They prepare department report cards every month to report on how performance is on the move, and they spend a lot of time coaching.
"Classroom training is part of the puzzle, but without true behavior change and accountability, you haven't completed that puzzle," says Lucas. "So our training managers are out there, watching training being delivered, watching managers in action, doing spot checks, and giving feedback afterward. They're the keepers of service and standards, so they have to be accessible and capture the knowledge of how operations work from day to day." Lucas points out that 13 out of the 18 training managers were promoted from line-level jobs or from operations, so they know the processes and the culture firsthand.
For line-level employees, training conveys the service standards by way of the classroom. For example, in a brand promises class, employees learn about the expectations of the company's culture. Classes include role-playing and simulations—the live or videotaped kind, not the electronic kind. The immediacy of video or live role plays helps to drive the message home, and the group experience is part of that. Although Lucas says the company has interest in integrating more technology with its training, for many employees it just wouldn't make sense.
"Our managers are the only ones with computers, and one whole department might share a computer," says Lucas. "This approach makes more sense based on the content and resources we're conveying. We're looking at some technology-oriented content that wouldn't require a computer, such as podcasts, but we're not there yet."
At the management level—Loews has nearly 1,200—a core management workshop, a train-the-trainer program, and other management workshops (such as the one on building the brand) help to create leadership that can not only help build the brand but inspire others to do so, as well.
Changes in the company's performance management system also have made the brand promise more top-of-mind. The company has created a system in which individual managers' performance ratings are linked to their contributions to company goals.
The company also has begun to raise its own crop of quality employees whose chances of rising in the company are good because of their obvious potential. The idea is to grow talented leaders, but also to "raise" people who get the culture and who know how to make a hotel feel like a Loews Hotel. Loews' high-potential program offers additional training, development planning, and extra opportunities to employees who show promise, and it's integrated with the performance review process. Managers are asked what they're doing to develop their people, and the answer is part of their performance rating. A focus on growing its own already has paid off; internal promotions have been running at about 55 percent, and more than 75 percent of the former high-potential program participants are still with the company and have been promoted.
"The program started with an operations focus, and we focused on the front desk employees, maintenance positions, and the like," Lucas says. "But now all disciplines are in the program in different ways."
Going forward, Lucas would love to do more of the videos that help instruct front-line employees in good service, so that more specific visual examples of more tasks would be available. And although certain obstacles limit the company's use of technology-based learning, Lucas wants to move into offering more solutions of that type on-site.
She also wants to tap into the generation known as Y, and to do so, her department has been exploring the possibilities of MySpace. Loews is not really using it for training yet, but Lucas knows the way to Gen Y leads through avenues such as iPods, podcasts, and MySpace. "There are opportunities there; we just have to figure out how to tap into them," Lucas says.
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