Strength of Langham Place Hotel

Langham Place Hotel was the gold winner of the HKMA Quality Award 2007 and
Award for Excellent in Training 2006. It demonstrates a lots of good employment
practices. The followings introduce some of the good employment practices done by
the Langham Place Hotel (Langham Place, 2007).

-Leadership
In order to cement the quality culture, the hotel formed seven TQM category teams
and the all champions of the teams are the Hotel’s Executives Committee members.
The teams are responsible in conducting internal assessment and implementation of
improvement actions based on some standard criteria. With the personal involvement
with senior leaders, the employees are fully engaged in the quality journey and
develop a sense of ownership for quality excellent.

-Training and development

The hotel believes that they should release the employee’s talents and unlashing their
collective brain power to achieve their continuous improvement. Therefore, the hotel
emphasis on the training of the associates and spent a lots of resources on it. For
example, all new associates will be paired with a mentor when joining the hotel. The
hotel also provides lots of innovative training which are fully aligned with their
strategic goals.

-Communication
Langham Place Hotel has established various communication channels, such as the bi-
annual All Associates Satisfaction Survey and “lunch with GM” to foster effective
two-way communications between management and associates. It can motivate the
associates and decrease the management conflicts within the hotel as the associates
can express their opinions to the management team directly.
Furthermore, the hotel also setup the Idea Wall, Idea box, internet, knowledge centre,
Blogs and comment cards to facilitates knowledge and opinions transfer between the
stakeholders, management team and the associates. It can also bring to innovations
and continuous improvements.

Compare with other hotels

When compare Langham Place Hotel with the other hotels in Hong Kong, the
Langham Place Hotel shows it is outstanding in the employment practices too. The
following are two cases about the Hong Kong Disneyland’s Hotel and Regal
Riverside Hotel that they failed to do well in some employment practices. Langham
Place will be compared with them in these areas to see how they are superior to the
others.

Hong Kong Disneyland’s Hotel was set up in 2005 in Hong Kong. It was criticized by
their employees in these years. It is because the management team had not analysis
the situation of the Hong Kong Disneyland and only introduced the America
Disneyland’s Management style to Hong Kong Disneyland (wenweipo, 2006). They
did not provided the appropriated training course to the hotel’s associates which cause
them did not know how to solve the customers’ problems. It leads to the
unsatisfactory of the associates as well as the customers. It also lowered the team’s
spirit and their productivity. It is clear than the Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel’s
management team did not do well in defined the training needs of their employees.

In this training area, the Langham Place Hotel did a good job. The hotel does not only
have the mentorship program, they also based on some special customer problem to
develop some specific course to the associates. A program called Guest Support
Technologists (GST) is one of the examples (HKMA, 2007). GST training was based
on rigorous Training Needs Analysis. The Hotel analyzed guests’ calls for help and
identified major types of IT problems, e.g. internet access. GST training required deep
intervention, in all areas of technical IT knowledge, communication and service skills,
and confidence building. All the staff including waiters/waitresses, bell, concierge,
security, housekeeping attendants, etc could be a volunteer of GST. On one hand, the
program can solve the customers’ inquired and problems. On the other hand, it helped
to enhance loyalty and motivation of frontline staff that performed basic–level jobs
and created for them a sense of satisfaction and achievement.

The other case was about Regal Riverside Hotel that dismissed an employee
unreasonably (Hotel, Food and Beverage Employees Associaion, 2004). In 2004, Mr.
Au Yueng who was the kitchen director of the Regal Riverside Hotel was fired by the
hotel. The hotel claimed that the employee made a serious mistake so that they needed
to fire him. However, Mr. Au Yueng was a good employee who had got many awards.
He also stated that the hotel did not arrange enough subordinates to him in this case
which lead him to cause a minor mistake. After this case happened, the hotel only
gave him a warning letter. Because Mr. Au Yueng was disappointed with the hotel,
then he resigned the job. After he gave the resign letter to his boss, the boss gave him
two more warning letters and told him that he was fired because of his mistakes so
that he cannot get any compensation. It is clear that the appraisal system of the hotel
was not clear so it led to the conflicts between the management team and the
employees.

As for the Langham Place Hotel, it has developed a performance measurement

framework. All of the employees need to be constantly aware of their own
performance success. With the mature performance appraisal system, it can reduce the
conflicts between the associates cause by bias and perception. It can also give clear
concept of the standard of good performance to the associates. Also, the Langham
Place Hotel has many communication channels between the manager and the
associates as mentioned above. It can help them to understand each other and reduce
the disputes between them.

The benefits of Langham Place Hotel doing well in employment practices

For doing well in the employment practices, Langham Place Hotel increased the
employees’ satisfactory level successfully. The associates have strong loyalty with the
hotel and perform better in their daily works. Because of the best services that the
employees provided, the customers’ satisfactory level also increased and the profit of
the hotel also increased. The hotel uptakes the social responsibilities that they treat the
associates well also helps them t build up their reputation.

Conclusion

In the about discussion, it shows that the criteria of the good employer is actually the
human resources functions. It is clear that doing well in all the human resources
functions are the responsibilities of all organization. Therefore, there should not have
any ‘good employers’ in the world as all the companies should fulfill those of the
criteria or do well in HR functions.
The companies which cannot do well in all employment practices are because they
only focus on their benefits and neglect their duties. It is irrational to classify any
company as good employers because they did well in all these practices as it is their
responsibilities but the others do not.
As for the good employer award, it could be meaningless. As we had discussed
before, the companies which get the award does not means that it is really a good
employer now or in the future. So that a company which have not get any award also
does not mean that they fail to demonstrate that employment practices. All of the
award should be regarded as an encouragement to the company to do better and better.
The most important things is that all of the companies should realize their
responsibilities and continuous to improve themselves in all employment practices.
They will gain the benefits throughout it.

Reference

Help the poor employee. (2006, February 27). Wenweipo

HKMA (2007). AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN TRAINING 2006 JUDGES’

REPORT. Retrieved November 2, 2009 from
http://hkma.org.hk/pdf/ta_judges_report2006.pdf

Hotel, Food and Beverage Employees Associaion (2007). Objection to the Regal
Riverside Hotel to dismiss the good employee. Retrieved October 27, 2009 from
http://www.ftu.org.hk/view.php?Tid=432

Langham Place (2007). Lamghan Place report summary. Retrieved

November 7, 2009 from
http://www.hkma.org.hk/pdf/qa/HKMA_Langham_RS.pdf