Hospitality Paradigm

An interesting case study…

First you hire someone, then you train them. Right? David Bowd thinks that’s backward.

Earlier this year, the CEO of Salt Hotels was preparing to open his fourth location, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. But he didn’t run a cattle call. He and his team started Salt School instead.

“This is an industry where it’s all about attitude and hard work,” said Bowd, whose resume includes stints with boutique hoteliers like Ian Schrager and Andre Balazs.

The company invited local job-seekers to a free, 10-week, 25-hour introduction to hospitality, and the only requirement was explaining why they wanted to be included. The result: 380 applicants, from teens to 60-year-olds, for 160 spots – many with moving stories of seeking a break, a second chance, or to be a role model for their kids.

“We set about calling in every favor we could with all the hotel friends we had” to staff the Saturday morning sessions, Bowd said, which focused on topics like sales and marketing, F&B and revenue management. In one class, students role-played front desk scenarios – luggage delivered to the wrong room, complaints about loud neighbors. “The purpose was to make decisions on the fly. It’s thinking creatively,” he added.

Bowd watched students gravitate toward certain responsibilities. “It was such a natural evolution of people moving toward areas that they felt comfort in and had a passion for,” he remembered. It also fostered a healthy competition. “You see who’s shy, who’s outgoing, and you are able to match people with their skill set much easier because you see them perform,” he said.

In the end, 110 students graduated, and the hotel hired 67 (three have been promoted); 90% were from Asbury Park. Other local companies have inquired about hiring the students, as well.

“At the end I thought, why have we never done this before? We just employed a whole workforce that we’ve already spent 10 weeks with,” Bowd said. “They know what our core values are, they know what to expect, they have a passion, they’re all local. This is a no-brainer.”

It’s also a lot of hard work, he acknowledges, but with results that far exceeded traditional recruitment, using an approach that he would like to see larger companies use in the communities they enter.

The school moves next year to Topeka, Kansas, where Salt is working on a 109-room hotel. Former students will become staffers to help prepare for an early 2018 opening. “I’ve opened many hotels, and this is the best way of doing it,” Bowd said.

Emotional management skills which provide competency to balance emotions and reason so as to maximize long term happiness for self as well as dealing with others, when applied within organizations has major benefits.

Customer Service: Learning how to help your customers feel heard, understood, helped, served, respected, valued and important.

Hiring: Selecting employees with relatively high Emotional Intelligence, i.e. emotionally sensitive, aware, optimistic, resilient, positive and responsible.

Turnover: Enabling turnover reduction through helping employees feel appreciated, recognized, supported, challenged, rewarded and respected.

Training: Raising EQ at all levels of the business through Emotional Literacy and EQ awareness workshops.

Corporate Culture: Creating an environment where employees feel safe, trusted, special, needed, included, important, cooperative, focused, productive, motivated, respected and valued.

Productivity: Developing intrinsic motivation. Increasing employee commitment, cooperation and cohesion. Reducing lost time spent on conflicts, turf-battles, defensiveness and insecurity.

Goal Setting: Setting goals based on feelings. For example, stating the goal that we want customers to feel satisfied, appreciated, etc. and setting similar goals for employees, and then getting feedback on feelings and measuring and tracking performance.

Emotional Support: Mitigating negative emotions like fear, worry, anxiety, and stress.

Leadership: A leader with high EQ is emotionally aware. This means that he or she is aware of his own feelings and is not limited to logic, intellect and reasons when making decisions and managing people.

Its going to get harder and harder to think of Instagram  as nothing more than a simple tool for sharing a filtered version of your life with family and friends as this social media platform is fast becoming a marketing machine.

Now, businesses can set up a profile that contains a “contact” button that allows prospective buyers to call, email, or text a seller without ever having to leave the app. That grill making your mouth water? Call and make a reservation at the restaurant.

There is also the new Insights feature which promises to give businesses actionable information about ‘who their followers are and whose posts resonate better than others.’ By learning more about the behaviour and demographics of your audience, one can create more relevant and timely content.

Sellers will be able to promote posts, turning well-performing posts into ads right within the app. A business simply has to select an existing post, add an action button, and then select a target audience (or let Instagram suggest an audience on its behalf). From there, you will have an ad ready to run for as long as you’d like. The whole world will be able to access these tools by the end of the year.