We all expect service with a smile and avoid establishments that do not provide it. We are often willing to pay a premium for high-quality service. Yet, if you are paying $1,000 a night for a hotel stay, you expect something more. A hotel that manages to be amazing in a segment where customers expect to be amazed must be doing something worth knowing about. Given its reputation as THE luxury hotel, it may surprise you to learn about its humble beginnings as Four Seasons Motor Hotel in 1961. The founder, Isadore Sharp, established the first Four Sea-sons in Toronto, Canada. It now operates 98 properties around the world (but does not own the properties). It was a public company until 2007, when it was bought back to private ownership and now it is owned by Bill Gates, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, and the Sharp family. The company found in its early days that what would distinguish them from the competition was service quality. They are the pioneers of many things that we take for granted in a hotel room, starting with having shampoo in bathrooms, and later lighted mirrors or TVs within armoires. Yet they also quickly found that all of these can easily be emulated by the rivals. So what makes the difference comes down to the quality of service provided by employees. It is estimated that in a modest size hotel, there are 5,000 employee-customer "touchpoints" every day. Each and every one of these can be used to "wow" the customer. Four Seasons teaches employees to do so with one fundamental guiding principle: "Deal with others as you would have them deal with you." Employees of Four Seasons demonstrate customer service heroics every day. One employee had to find a tuxedo for a customer with a last-minute event, and eventually lent the customer one owned by an employee. Another example is a receptionist staying on the phone with a customer for more than 30 minutes to help a customer reach their destination in bad weather. Every employee seems to know your name, and you are pampered throughout your visit. Every inter-action is an opportunity to make the customer feel like a celebrity. How do you motivate employees to provide customer service heroics every day? In most organizations, customer-facing employees are among the lowest paid. At Four Seasons, it all starts with their employees. They have an incredibly selective hiring policy where each employee is interviewed at least four times, mainly to see if they have the right service attitude. Then they go through a 12-week training program to teach them how to improvise excellent service. Employees who do not fit the culture are quickly replaced with ones who do. The ones who stay end up staying for a long time, because the company firmly believes that no employee will treat customers better than they themselves are treated. Once the company starts managing a new hotel, one of the first things they do is to upgrade the employee facilities. The managers are coaches and mentors, and employees are fully empowered, trusted, and valued. The company promotes from within, and provides excellent benefits, complete with company contributions to retirement plans, profit sharing, and six-day stays a year at any of the hotel's properties (after working for the company more than one year). As a result, the company has a turnover rate that is one-third of that of the industry. Four Seasons has been among Fortune magazine's best places to work list since the inception of the list, and it is seen as a highly desirable place to work. When they opened their location in Mumbai, India, in 2008, they received 34,000 resumes, conducted 15,000 interviews, and hired 450 people.

1. Describe Four Seasons organizational culture. 2. Despite the long hours and difficult working conditions typical of service work, Four Seasons still has the ability to motivate its staff to exhibit exemplary customer service. How might this be explained? 3. What is the role of Human Resource Management practices in creating and maintaining this culture? 4. How do you think this culture was created? What were the forces that shaped it over time?