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. Lisa Cruz knew that as a hospitality business, the Hotel Paris was uniquely dependent upon having committed, high-morale employees. In a factory or small retail shop, the employer might be able to rely on direct supervision to make sure that the employees were doing their jobs. But in a hotel, just about every employee is on the front line. There is usually no one there to supervise the limousine driver when he or she picks up a guest at the airport, or when the valet takes the guest's car, or the front-desk clerk signs the guest in, or the housekeeping clerk needs to handle a guest's special request. If the hotel wanted satisfied guests, they had to have committed employees who did their jobs as if they owned the company, even when the supervisor was nowhere in sight. But for the employees to be committed, Lisa knew the Hotel Paris had to make it clear that the company was also committed to its employees. From her experience, she knew that one way to this was to help her employees have successful and satisfying careers, and she was therefore concerned to find that the Hotel Paris had no career management process at all. Supervisors weren't trained to discuss employees developmental needs or promotional options during the performance appraisal interviews. Promotional processes were informal. And the firm did not attempt to provide any career development services that might help its employees to develop a better understanding of what their career options were, or should be. Lisa was sure that committed employees were the key to improving the experiences of its guests, and that she couldn't boost employee commitment without doing a better job of attending to her employees career needs. For Lisa and the CFO, preliminary research left little doubt about the advisability of instituting a new career management system at the Hotel Paris. The CFO therefore gave the go-ahead to design and institute a new Hotel Paris career management program. Lisa and her team knew that they already had some of the building blocks in place, thanks to the new performance management system they had instituted just a few weeks earlier. For example, the new performance management system required that the supervisor appraise the employee based on goals and competencies that were driven by the company's strategic needs, and the appraisal itself produced new goals for the coming year and specific development plans for the employee. n
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 1. Many hotel jobs are inherently dead end; for example, maids, laundry workers, and valets either have no great aspirations to move up, or are just using these jobs temporarily, for instance, to help out with household expenses. First, do you agree with this statement why, or why not? Second, list three specific career activities you would recommend Lisa implement for these employees.?n
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 2. Build on the company s current performance management system by recommending two other specific career development activities the hotel should implement. ?n
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3. What specific career development activities would you recommend in light of the fact that the Hotel Paris and employees are disbursed around the world?