CASE STUDY: EMPRESS HOTEL

Davina Rullian has just taken over as personnel director at the EMPRESS Hotel Group, a major international five star hotel business that has hotels in the UK, Europe and South East Asia, and the UAE. The headquarters are in North London, Middlesex.

Davina’s task in previous hotels in which she has worked involved setting up systems and standard operating procedures and then producing a quality manual so all employees knew” what to do, how to do it and when to do it”. As part of her approach she would update the standard operating procedure on an annual basis. She was also involved in working directly with the Customer Service Training Department to provide coached scripts, encourage teamwork and allocate roles and responsibilities amongst staff. Davina, had personally trained senior hotel managers in leadership and motivation.

The EMPRESS Hotel Group, (EHG) she realised was going to be very different. The EHG Chairperson/CEO was Andrea Diviner, an evangelical American who has just stepped down. Her Vision it is “to create the most perfect hotel chain in the world”. She felt that the standardised operating procedure approach Organisational Change MGT3218 12 which is currently NOT being used utilised was not appropriate for the customers of an international five star hotel. She wanted customers to have a ‘taste’ of local culture and food and not a McDonalds type experience.

Unfortunately due to a global economic downturn, dramatic developments in artificial intelligence (which has resulted in a decrease in Executive business travel) the hotel has for the past 2 years been making a loss – in fact the hotel has experienced increases in operating costs and decreases in operating income. The hotel’s culture has been incredibly slow to adapt to changes in the macro economic environment. This has led to the shareholders sacking Andrea and bringing in a former CEO of a manufacturing plant. Employees are reported to be very worried about the ‘reported’ future changes and some have already begun to be absent through illness.

Davina, like most of the hotel’s management, had come from other mainstream chains, which were extremely different. Davina’s former HRM department’s role was to create manuals spelling out exactly what should be one by whom and how. The role of the operations managers was to implement these procedures and if they were not sure of anything they always knew they could find the answer in one of the manuals that covered one wall in their office. Davina’s predecessor who had worked in the hotel for the past 5 years and provided the hotel with luxurious furnishings, local produce and surroundings was also sacked.

The new CEO, was very clear on attaining their Vision for the hotel. Their vision was to compete with locally run hotels that offered a high quality service at a reasonable cost. The type of customer the CEO had in mind are tourists who typically stay at the hotels for around 10 days and Executives (typical stay 2 days) that no longer had a vast company budget from which to spend on accommodation. The CEO knows that many organisational changes would have to take place to fulfil their Vision for the hotel. However, they are determined to bring about his Vision and believed that Davina was instrumental in the change process necessary for its fulfilment. All the staff are paid slightly above the industry average and EMPRESS Hotels are seen as THE place to work. However, the hotels are not necessarily seen as THE place to stay by customers. Customer feedback to date has been very poor. This includes very importantly poor and inefficient services and Organisational Change MGT3218 13 specifically a service that is not timely nor responsive to customer needs, (apparently hindered by inefficient processes and ineffective use of capacity).

In summary, the CEO said: “We need to put my Vision into practice – and this is going to need considerable organisational change”. Davina has been tasked with providing the CEO an organisational change report.

Brief

You are a Consultant specialising in Organisational Change. Davina a newly recruited member of the Executive Management Team for the EHG has specifically employed you to research, critically evaluate and make recommendations in a report to her on organisational change as it relates to the hotel. This will include amongst other things; type of change, triggers and drivers of change, how culture impacts organisational change, likely resistance to change and leadership role. You will also need to detail a set of recommendations at the end of your report.

The extent to which managerial solutions to the business issues raised are well argued

• The use of appropriate sources of information (e.g. reputable business journals, research reports and academic journals)
• The degree to which the information put forward in the report is synthesised, critically evaluated and analysed
• The degree to which appropriate conclusions are derived from a critical evaluation of the main issues raised in the report other considerations include:
• Clarity and structure of the arguments (formal report writing format with appropriate executive summary, introduction and conclusions) • overall presentation, including spelling, grammar and punctuation.