THE HOTEL PARIS CASE - The New Training Program

The Hotel Paris’ competitive strategy is to use superior guest service to differentiate the Hotel

Paris properties, and to thereby increase the length of stay and return rate of guests, and thus

boost revenues and profitability. HR manager Lisa Cruz must now formulate functional policies

and activities that support this competitive strategy by eliciting the required employee behaviors

and competencies.

As she reviewed her company s training processes, Lisa had reasons to be concerned. For one

thing, the Hotel Paris relied almost exclusively on informal on-the-job training. New security

guards attended a 1-week program offered by a law enforcement agency, but all other new hires,

from assistant manager to housekeeping crew, learned the rudiments of their jobs from their

colleagues and their supervisors, on the job. Lisa noted that the drawbacks of this informality

were evident when she compared the Hotel Paris s performance on various training metrics with

those of other hotels and service firms. For example, in terms of number of hours training per

employee per year, number of hours training for new employees, cost per trainee hour, and

percent of payroll spent on training, the Hotel Paris was far from the norm when benchmarked

against similar firms.

Indeed, as Lisa and the CFO reviewed the measures of the Hotel Paris s current training efforts,

it was clear that(when compared to similar companies) some changes were in order. Most other

service companies provided at least 40 hours of training per employee per year, while the Hotel

Paris offered, on average, no more than 5 or 6 hours. Similar firms offered at least 40 hours of

training per new employee, while the Hotel Paris offered, at most, 10. Even the apparently good

metrics comparisons