Ritz-Carlton: Rebuilding an enterprise with employee learning

"It's time to stop walking the old ways!"

After 16 years, Michael Hammer and The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC issue The same "reinvention" manifesto. However, the latter's re-engineering has long gone beyond Hammer's original definition.

The author of "Reengineering the Enterprise" and a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pioneered in 1990: In order to achieve dramatic improvements in business performance, companies should reengineer their operations - using the power of modern information technology to dramatically improve Redesign the core processes of every business.

Technology and its reengineering of processes have since become the "magic weapon" of many companies and an excuse for large layoffs. The true master lies in the "reengineering" of the self. Hamer soon realized that he had given too little thought to "people" and corrected it in subsequent writings.

The shift from technology to people's focus is also reflected in Lijia's reengineering road started in July 2006: process reengineering comes from technology, and technology refresh starts from every employee. Training and learning, or "reengineering the workforce," is the source of all change.

Training Points, Lines and Surfaces

Difficulty adapting to new processes and new cultures? Perhaps this is not only the employee's fault, but a testament to the good effect of the previous training. The question now is how to use training to "recreate" new inertia.

The first is "face": finding a new direction is the first step in reengineering an enterprise, and it is also the basis for reengineering employees. The direction is set, and all employees need to receive unified training.

As a representative of traditional high-end hotels, Ritz-Carlton's self-proclaimed "a little change in corporate culture" may scare away guests, and may even make it difficult for front-line employees who have adhered to the "gold standard" for many years. But Group Vice President Diana Oreck still firmly said, "We no longer tell you how to make your guests happy", but let employees serve more personalized customers in a more personalized way. To this end, the Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Shanghai took half a year to complete the training of more than 700 employees in batches.

As Hammer put it in 2001: "It will be these businesses that will thrive—they will reinvent the business with customer facing, customer service, and customer convenience in mind." It is tantamount to on-the-job training.

The second is "line": reengineering employees from the top, breaking down the customer orientation into the schedules of employees at all levels.

As part of a personalization strategy, Ritz-Carlton is no longer one-size-fits-all. Each hotel was asked to identify and deploy a unique "theme" based on its local environment. For example, the Half Moon Bay Hotel in California's wine country has a "fire and wine on the beach" theme, and guests can enjoy wine and bonfires on the balcony. In conclusion, "everything in the hotel is related to this (theme), from lighting, uniforms to the exterior of the building." The general managers and creative directors of each hotel therefore participated in a one-day related training.

This high-level intensive training is not only re-learning, but also a catalyst for the implementation of new culture, new strategy, and new process along the power line.

The last is "point": use case study to break through key and difficult points, and use group discussion to clarify how to implement new standards and new processes.

“The biggest difficulty we encountered was that the scale of freedom and flexibility was very vague.” The problems encountered by Ritz-Carlton’s Shanghai employees were not isolated cases. Previously, the hotel's famous gold standard consisted of 20 basic rules, so detailed that when a guest said thank you, staff couldn't say "you are welcome" but "my pleasure". Now, in order to provide a more humane service, employees have to put aside all express regulations and explore what is the natural and sincere way of hospitality.

The case discussions in the training may not answer all questions, but this mutual learning and key breakthroughs will undoubtedly increase the courage and confidence of employees to accept reengineering.

Learn from mistakes

Enterprise reengineering needs to tap the potential of each position from the entire business process. Undoubtedly, individual employees will take on greater responsibility. Appropriate training follow-up measures can create a "continuous improvement" learning atmosphere and help employees turn stress into motivation.

Reengineering is innovation, and mistakes are bound to increase in the initial stage. Li Jia realized this, and their way of dealing with mistakes is not to blame, but to point out and correct them in time. Job engineering is the process of learning from mistakes.

On the one hand, it is the attitude of the company from top to bottom to form the most suitable informal environment for corporate and employee reengineering.

In Ritz-Carlton, mistakes at work are collectively referred to as a cartoon-like "Mr. BIVs", which is an abbreviation of the three words breakdowns, inefficiencies, and variations. This allows each employee to face each mistake with a learning attitude, and ensures that each mistake that may affect the overall reconstruction is reported in time instead of being covered up.

On the other hand, the regular formal learning system provides a good growth platform for employee reengineering.

Every Ritz-Carlton hotel, every department, every day will hold a regular meeting. During the meeting, employees usually learn and discuss the gold standard of the day, famous quotes, guest satisfaction index, hotel business data, yesterday's guest complaints, and the special preferences of the current day's guests, etc., to ensure that global employees maintain a unified understanding of the company culture during the reengineering process. Of course, the discussion also includes what type of "Mr. BIVs" has appeared most recently.

Now, more and more enterprises are joining Ritz-Carlton's learning-based reengineering, echoing the reflections of the masters ten years ago with practice. Just as Hammer set out to reinvent his "reengineering" theory, Peter Senge in 1997 described 21st-century business this way:

"The traditional 'command-and-control' business model hardly leads us into the twentieth century. A century. … CEOs can no longer hope to motivate subordinates to change by command. Gradually, successful organizations will build competitive advantage on the basis of less control and more learning. In this way, we must rethink leadership and Learning."

A learning organization rooted in employees will allow enterprises to embark on a new path of reconstruction. Ultimately, learning is synonymous with reengineering, and corporate reengineering will become a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement, no longer just an exciting "revolutionary manifesto."

The author is an associate editor of the CEConline website.