1. Provide a one-page summary of what individual hotel managers should know in order to make it more likely incoming employees from abroad will adapt to their new surroundings.

2. In previous chapters you recommended various human resource practices Hotel Paris should use. Choose one of these, and explain why you believe they could take this program abroad, and how you suggest they do so.

3. Choose one Hotel Paris human resources practice that you believe is essential to the company specifically for achieving its high-quality-service goal, and explain how you would implement that practice in the firm’s various hotels worldwide.

Improving Performance at The Hotel Paris

Managing Global Human Resources

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.

With hotels in 11 cities in Europe and the United States, Lisa knew that the company had to do a better job of managing its global human resources, Lisa knew. For example, there were no formal means of identifying or training management employees for duties abroad (for those going either to the United States or to Europe). As another example, recently, after spending upward of $200,000 on sending a U.S. manager and her family abroad, they had to return her abruptly when the family complained of missing their friends back home. Lisa knew this was no way to run a multinational business. She turned her attention to developing the HR practices her company required to do business more effectively internationally.

On reviewing the data, it was apparent to Lisa and the CFO that the company’s global human resource practices were probably inhibiting the Hotel Paris from being the world-class guest services company that it sought to be. For example, high-performing service and hotel firms had formal departure training programs for at least 90% of the employees they sent abroad; the Hotel Paris had no such programs. Similarly, with each city’s hotel operating its own local hotel HR information system, there was no easy way for Lisa, the CFO, or the company’s CEO to obtain reports on metrics like turnover, absences, or workers’ compensation costs across all the different hotels. As the CFO summed it up, “If we can’t measure how each hotel is doing in terms of human resource metrics like these, there’s really no way to manage these activities, so there’s no telling how much lost profits and wasted efforts are dragging down each hotel’s performance.” Lisa received approval to institute new global human resources programs and practices.

In instituting these new programs and practices, Lisa had several goals in mind. She wanted an integrated human resource information system (HRIS) that allowed her and the company’s top managers to monitor and assess, on an ongoing basis, the company’s global performance on strategically required employee competencies and behaviors such as attendance, morale, commitment, and service-oriented behavior. To address this need, she received approval to contract with a company that integrated, via the Internet, the separate hotels’ HR systems, including human resource and benefits administration, applicant tracking and résumé scanning, and employee morale surveys and performance appraisals.

She also contracted with an international HR training company to offer expatriate training for Hotel Paris employees and their families before they left for their foreign assignments, and to provide short-term support after they arrived. That training company also helped create a series of weeklong “Managers’ Seminars.” Held once every 6 months at a different hotel in a different city, these gave selected managers from throughout the Hotel Paris system an opportunity to meet and to learn more about the numerous new HR programs and practices that Lisa and her team had been instituting for the purpose of supporting the company’s strategic aims. With the help of their compensation specialist, Lisa and her team also instituted a new incentive program for each of the company’s local managers, to focus their attention more fully on the company’s service-oriented strategic aims. By the end of the year, the Hotel Paris’s performance on metrics such as percent of expatriates receiving pre-departure screening, training, and counseling were at or above those of high-performing similar companies. She and the CFO believed, rightly, that they had begun to get their global HR system under control.