1. Based on what you read in this chapter, what’s the first step you would have advised the Hotel Paris to take as part of its new safety and health program, and why?

2. List 10 specific high-risk areas in a typical hotel you believe Lisa and her team should look at now, including examples of the safety or health hazards that they should look for there.

3. Give three specific examples of how Hotel Paris can use HR practices to improve its safety efforts.

4. Write a one-page summary addressing the topic, “How improving safety and health at the Hotel Paris will contribute to us achieving our strategic goals.”

Improving Performance at the Hotel Paris

The New Safety and Health Program

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 and boost performance, by eliciting the required employee behaviors and competencies.

While “hazardous conditions” might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of hotels, Lisa Cruz knew that hazards and safety were in fact serious issues for the Hotel Paris. Indeed, everywhere you look—from the valets leaving car doors open on the driveways to slippery areas around the pools, to thousands of pounds of ammonia, chlorine, and other caustic chemicals that the hotels use each year for cleaning and laundry, hotels provide a fertile environment for accidents. Obviously, hazardous conditions are bad for the Hotel Paris. They are inhumane for the workers. High accident rates probably reduce employee morale and thus service. And accidents raise the company’s costs and reduce its profitability, for instance, in terms of workers’ compensation claims and absences. Lisa knew that she had to clean up her firm’s occupational safety and health systems, for its employees’ well-being, and to achieve the company’s strategic goals.

Lisa and the CFO reviewed their company’s safety records, and what they found disturbed them. In terms of every safety-related metric they could find, including accident costs per year, lost time due to accidents, workers’ compensation per employee, and number of safety training programs per year, the Hotel Paris compared unfavorably with most other hotel chains and service firms. “Just in terms of extra workers’ compensation costs, the Hotel Paris must be spending $500,000 a year more than we should be,” said the CFO. And that didn’t include lost time due to accidents, or the negative effect accidents had on employee morale, or the cost of litigation (as when, for instance, one guest accidentally burned himself with chlorine that a pool attendant had left unprotected). The CFO authorized Lisa to develop a new safety and health program.

Lisa and her team began by hiring a safety and health consultant, someone who had been an inspector and then manager with OSHA. Based on the analysis, the team then took numerous steps, including the following. First, specially trained teams consisting of someone from Lisa’s HR group, the local hotel’s assistant manager, and three local hotel employees went through each local hotel “with a fine tooth comb,” as Lisa put it. They used an extensive checklist to identify and eliminate unsafe conditions.

Lisa’s team took other steps. They convinced the Hotel Paris’s board of directors and chairman and CEO to issue a joint statement emphasizing the importance of safety, and the CEO, during a one-month period, visited each hotel to meet with all employees and emphasize safety. The Hotel Paris also contracted with a safety training company. This firm created special online safety programs for the company’s managers, and developed five-day training seminars for the hotels’ staffs. The new programs seem to be effective. Lisa and the CFO were pleased to find, after about a year, that accident costs per year, lost time due to accidents, and workers’ compensation expenses were all down at least 40%. And anecdotal evidence from supervisors suggested that employees feel better about the company’s commitment to them and were providing better service as a result.