This story begins when Hyatt Hotels & Resorts took over and rebranded ("reflagged") an existing hotel in Mexico City. Soon after the acquisition, President and CEO Mark Hoplamazian went down to see for himself how things were going for the troops he had inherited.
“Unfortunately,” he tells me, “when you're the CEO and you sit down face-to-face for the first time with an employee, the person across from you oftentimes freezes up. They're not sure how much they should share, so I’ll get platitudes like, 'Everything is great.' With this one employee in particular, I was having a hard time; I was obviously making her uncomfortable. To try to break through, I asked her, 'Maybe you can just tell me about the first day you came to work when the hotel was newly under our management. Tell me about that specific day.'"
Still, it took a while longer for Hoplamazian to break through to the nervous employee. “Her first answer to this was still, ‘It was great.’ So I tried some very specific questions: 'Look, tell me what time you woke up that morning.' She looked at me, 'What are you talking about?' I said, "Was it sunny out? How did you get to work? What time did you arrive at work?' To cut a long story short, within about 10 minutes she was in tears telling me about her experience. In the first 48 hours of our management, she had learned mostly about how she could get fired! The onboarding/orientation program was all about compliance and policies and rules and regulations–like it is at so many companies. And the result was that it had terrified her.”
Yikes. What in the world was going on? How did orientation, a key moment in this employee’s relationship to her new company, get so twisted, so counterproductive? The question that answers this question is as follows: Whose perspective, whose lens, was used when designing this orientation?
The answer, says Hoplamazian, is that it "was designed by, and through the lens of, our legal department and the compliance purposes of our HR department. And believe me, this is not unusual in companies today: to spend orientation making sure to get all the checks checked in all the boxes on all the forms and making sure to get all these forms into our files. But this was so counterproductive–the employee I spoke with was correct: it really sounded like ‘A Hundred Ways You Can Get Fired By Hyatt.’”
Mark Hoplamazian, CEO Hyatt Hotels Corporation (Image Credit: Hyatt)
Hoplamazian, who became CEO of Hyatt in 2006 after an extensive career with Hyatt's then-corporate parent The Pritzker Organization, went to work with his Hyatt team rearranging the orientation experience by looking at it from the perspective of what makes sense to the employees—and emphasized how to make the customer experience make sense to their customers as well.
“We went back and redesigned the entire orientation process. The entirety of the first day of onboarding is now about what we stand for, what it means to be part of the Hyatt family–viewed and presented from an emotional perspective. Not from a left-brain, commercial perspective but from a right-brain experiential perspective.” Orientation being a touchpoint that can really color an employee’s entire perspective on her job and her employer, this is an important place to start making a culture difference at a company.
And Hyatt has applied “design thinking” or what I might call “the POV switcheroo” to other important areas as well. Hoplamazian was working onsite with housekeepers (yes, he is quite the hands-on CEO) and the scheduling issues he noticed on his rotation were clearly making life more difficult for the housekeepers. By shifting point of view, his team solved (or is potentially solving; it is still in a pilot phase) a problem that has challenged even mighty Starbucks: How to schedule employees in an extended-hours business in a way that fits with their lives and keeps the company humming along at the same time.
Hoplamazian: "In the course of working with one housekeeper in particular at a hotel of ours here in Chicago, I asked her for some changes Hyatt could make that would enhance her life. She told me, 'Every once in a while I need to stay home in the morning to take care of my grandchild, because my daughter works. I find this very difficult to do because of the way our scheduling process works.' I reported this back [to the leadership team]. I said, 'We’ve got to go back to the drawing board on this and figure out ways for people to easily flex when they need to.'
"Unbeknownst to me, at the same time that I had this experience, a colleague of ours was in another hotel here in Chicago. A similar question was raised by the housekeepers. My colleague’s response was, 'Well, sounds to me like you all could maybe do a better job of figuring it out on your own. So, why don't you get together and figure out how you would prefer to have the scheduling work, and we'll provide you with the tools to help you do that, including the technology so that the system that can be accessed remotely rather than you having to be onsite.'" (The issue here is that if a housekeeper finishes a shift on a Tuesday and leaves the hotel, her circumstances may change before her shift on Wednesday, so coming back to the hotel to reschedule isn't really workable.)
"So, we’ve started doing this and the response so far, from the local team, has been phenomenal. I’m very optimistic that we’ll be able actually take this to scale so we can both allow people to really feel like they're more in control of their work lives and truly have it work commercially. Which I really think is the right way to do it: there’s no reason that the housekeeping department can’t self-schedule. They don't need a superimposed way to do that.”
*****
If Hoplamazian can energize the entire Hyatt culture through a change in perspective, you can do the same at your company. This is a company with a very diverse hotel portfolio and a history that has been sometimes marked by labor tensions and missteps. Yet through switching the perspective, the POV, they are gaining a clarity and flexibility that is not just helpful but necessary as they rapidly expand the Hyatt stable of hotel brands to include more, and more truly diverse, hotel brands than any other company of their size, including the most recent additions: boutique lifestyle brand Andaz, extended-stay Hyatt House, select-service (industry lingo for "economical") Hyatt Place, and the just-launched Centric (whose first location opened this month in Chicago with about 15 more planned this year).
To be able to do so requires not just a workforce truly supported by management, but management that is, in turn, truly supported by the workforce in the ultimate effort of supporting their customers. “The core of the Hyatt,” as Hoplamazian puts it, “needs to be there, period: the part of hospitality that is timeless—human engagement, that core principle of caring for people,” and needs to be maintained regardless of the differences in the specific brand experience. "It is only by getting that part across consistently, through an aligned workforce, that we become free to specialize in the experiential part of the brand experience, whether it's the 'Room with a View' art series if you're at Andaz Liverpool Street in London, or the wine engagement that we've got at Andaz Napa, or the engagement with the New York Public Library at Andaz Fifth Avenue, or the way the new Centric hotels serve as launch pads for exploration."
Micah Solomon is a corporate culture consultant, customer service speaker and bestselling business author, most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service
