Hospitality Paradigm

Procrastination is usually a deep rooted habit, stemming from a fear of failure, apprehension, anger, hostility laziness or a general lack of interest. We can change our habits provided we use the right system. In any task, the prompt first step is important, however difficult or annoying it may be.

The tendency to postpone things is called procrastination. How many of us get into New Year resolutions like daily exercise, quitting smoking, writing a diary etc.? Quite often this resolution does not last for more than a week. We need to match tasks to our level and deal with procrastination head-on by focusing on starting rather than finishing, looking for constructive criticism (aka critique) and by being decisive and setting priorities.

Do not try to do too much too quickly. First force yourself right now, to do one thing that earlier you have been putting off.

There is a difference between striving for excellence and striving for perfection. The first is attainable, gratifying and healthy whereas the second is often difficult to attain, frustrating, nerve wracking and results in time-wastage and stress.

Ask yourself what would happen if I do not do those activities aimed at perfection at all? If you are brutally honest with yourself, for some the answers may be ‘nothing would happen’. Peter Drucker says, ‘I have yet to see an executive regardless or rank or station who could not consign something like a quarter of the demands on his time to the waste paper basket without anybody noticing their disappearance’.

Learn to decline tactfully but firmly every request that does not contribute to your goal of striving for excellence. If you point out that your motivation is not to get out of work but to save your time to do a better job on the really important things, you will have a good chance of avoiding non-productive tasks.

A person who contributes to an organization or team is always more effective. Generally, managers focus on efforts and also on displaying their authority downwards. This is the age of specialists. Each executive first needs to think of the one quality he/she has at which he/she is extremely good at and which nobody can do better to produce exceptional results?

Vijay, VP-Operations of budget Hotel chain was at the no. 2 position, next to the CEO for around 20 years. The CEO a much younger person than Vijay was quite an aggressive person, a taskmaster. The sudden demise of the CEO made the board promote the VP Operations to the top slot. Vijay, now the new CEO was quite unprepared for the job as it came on too suddenly.

While he was taking the charge of the situation he asked himself the question, “What is it that I can do exceptionally well? How can I contribute? The answer that he received after careful introspection was that his tenure as a CEO was not to be more than 3 years as he was 55 years old. The only way he could make the difference was by developing people under him.

From then on every afternoon for one hour, he would take out personal files of his subordinates and individually discuss their strengths and opportunities for improvement and the action-plan they should make for themselves so as to rise within the organization. He would spend time counseling and guiding them, using all his many years of experience in the industry.Within three years he showed phenomenal growth and also developed a team of highly effective managers.

Instead of focusing on efforts can we focus on results? Rather than keeping a close eye on how our subordinates function, can we look further where results need to be obtained? That is the true yardstick of success!

What does it take to be effective? Intelligence, Imagination or Knowledge? Perhaps all the three factors may be necessary to some extent for making us effective but then again all these three may not guarantee that one becomes effective by having these qualities.

To look at the two aspects of productivity, efficiency & effectiveness, consider a worker in a laundry department handling the operation of a calendar machine. His productivity is decided by the number of linen iron-rolled in a shift. He has been given clear instructions on what to do. His efficiency is decided by doing his task correctly. However in the case of a knowledge worker, things are quite different. A knowledge worker is the one who puts to use what is between his two ears. While a manual worker puts to use the skills he has in his hands, an executive is the one who not only does what is being told to him, but anticipates what is expected of him and makes the right decisions.

Consider a kitchen where the chef is extremely skilled. A dish prepared and served to the guest on time piping hot, is a culinary delight, only for the guest to discover half-way through his meal, a strand of scrubber wire (used by the kitchen steward to clean the pan earlier, on which the dish was cooked in). However skilled this Chef is, however fast the F&B team cooks and serves the dish (i.e., however efficient they are), this process will not be effective. When the guest discovers the foreign object in his plate, he will not be a happy guest. Not only will this lead to dissatisfaction but it will also in some way impact the profitability of the organization.

Knowledge work is not only defined by quantity or by costs, but it is also decided by the results one produces. An effective executive is a knowledge worker who takes the right decisions thus making a contribution to his organization. He has to plan, organize, motivate, and integrate to obtain the desired results.

Thus efficiency is about doing things right while effectiveness is about doing the right things!

Airline overbooking can add up to 3% incremental revenue on an annual basis and hence is a concept taken seriously by most airlines the world over.

Airlines overbook in order to maximize revenues and load factors and ensure that empty seats are avoided (aka spoilage) on high occupancy or sold out flights. Seats may go vacant even after booking for various reasons… Passengers may cancel their bookings, they may be no-shows, they may make duplicate bookings, they may misconnect flights, etc. This process of selling more seats than are available is the ethos of overbooking and by appropriately setting authorization levels higher than capacity to compensate for passenger cancellations and no-shows, airlines increase their bottom lines substantially as the entire amount apart from the meal/amenity costs of the overbooked passenger goes to the bottom-line.

When airline companies overbook a flight, the known factors are the aircraft capacity, current bookings and the company policy on overbooking while the uncertain factors are the no-shows and cancellations, the booking behaviour and activity, the customer reaction to denied boarding and associated costs and the number of unsold seats in a higher cabin.

If we want our guests to take us seriously, we must first look at building trust-bridges with them. Some of the factors that help develop trust with our guests are:

• Execute guest requests promptly and attend to their queries and complaints with alacrity
• Your body language and communication must communicate your openness and care for the guest.
• Do homework about your guest through ‘in-house guest recognition programs’, MICROS, social media, LinkedIn etc.
• To create a connection, seek for anything common between the guest and you in terms of Language, Interest, Caste, Acquaintances, etc.
• Exude confidence – a smile is the shortest distance between two people.
• Guests would like to deal with competent supervisors / executives.
• Remember that Competence is created by a) The Organization you work for             b) Similar projects you or your company may have executed and c) You

I had a mundane experience recently at Mumbai Airport where I had to while away in excess of 2 hours of my time as I had finished off my work earlier and had reached the airport four hours ahead of my flight schedule.

I decided to go into a Food and Beverage outlet on the first floor as I could not get any available recliners which have been recently placed towards the end of the domestic terminal at ground level. Normally, I would reach the airport just in time for my flight and would pass by this outlet without having any time or need to visit it. Since I had a few hours to spend, I decided I would lounge at this café.

Suffice it to say that the experience was absolutely nothing worth writing about, with surly young wait staff and uncaring supervisors’ one had to wave about for and whose attention one caught only if one waved rather more frantically than the other guests. I watched guests of all shapes, sizes and configurations during my hours here and noticed that all were uniformly served with an apathetic approach.

But my aim on writing this piece is not to dig into the service standards; rather it is to question the service model. When are we really going to get it? What is the customer coming here for? Do we really believe it is for the food or the beverages? Think again!

During my time at this lounge café, I noticed that it was 80-90% full always. However, the focus was not on food or beverages. The users really wanted good old fashioned butt-space… comfortable seating to while away their time until their flight. Yes, there were a few who did come in for the occasional snack or coffee, but the needy hungry of these were not more than 15-20%. Those who ordered food, beer or hot beverages were simply doing it so as to while away their time. The café benefitted from their ‘share of stomach’ simply by default.

So here are my offerings for those who set up these lounges and coffee shops for the proletariat (I do not refer here to the bourgeoisie who flood the airport lounges in their Armani and Louis Vuitton):

• Why not consider what the modern day frequent flier really wants?
• Keep the food and beverages – that’s fine… After all it would be nice to have a base revenue provider!
• Is the seating what the guest would like? Would be possible to have more cushioning, reclining, massaging, etc?
• Availability of iPad, iPod and what have you. Chargeable by the minute of course.
• From their table devices, guests should be able to order food, browse the web, hear their choice of music, watch a movie and stay updated with real-time flight information.
• Would it be possible to do a virtual tour of the airport shops while seated here? Is it logistically possible to purchase and have delivery of purchases done at the table or else at the store itself? An incentive would be required for this, both for the guest as well as for the lounge.
• Kids play pen in a corner perhaps?
• Board games, computerized play stations.
• Reading options… the good old fashioned way with real books (promoted by the airport book stores, to encourage people to sample recent releases and then order & pay for them through their table iPad and have them delivered within minutes to their table)… or else there’s always the iPad offering e-books!
• Innovative OTC food knick knacks as an impulse purchase take-away, synonymous with the city in which the airport is located.

Many of the above ideas may be chargeable and would be a supplementary revenue stream for the Café apart from the fact that guests will now be offered an experience.

Café owners may argue that not many travelers have the time to spend lounging around at airports, but I would beg to defer. Our fast paced lives today compel us to ‘waste’ our time at airports thanks to airline schedules and force majeure. In fact another way at looking at these innovative cafes could be that travelers may actually be ready to come in earlier knowing that they can truly ‘refresh’ themselves here instead of hanging around in the city with the impending peril of perhaps reaching late for their flight.