Turning priorities and goals into action is essential across all hospitality disciplines. From a people perspective, HR needs professionals who understand the company’s direction and have a vested interest in implementing it. It is all about execution.
When I interview HR candidates, if they say, I wanted to go into HR because I love people, the interview tends to end there. While social skills and empathy are vital, success in HR is about understanding company priorities and executing plans to achieve them. HR is about action and implementation, not just support. When done right, HR helps drive the organization toward its goals.
In my industry, it is all about the people; but when aligning HR with the business, it is about the direction one is driving the organization’s people. That direction and ultimate implementation defines success or failure of the business.
Regardless of your division – HR, Finance, Sales, Rooms – here are steps we can follow to make plans happen and drive our organizations towards self-defined success.
Step One: Define and Communicate Goals
Set clear, SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) for the coming year. Share these goals at all levels: department heads pass them down to their teams, discuss them openly in large employee meetings, and reinforce them through branded posters or monitors. Frequent exposure and discussion will build understanding and acceptance throughout the company.
Let us assume one of your goals is ensuring the achievement of a particular percentage engagement score on the employee survey. Such a goal is specific as it identifies the number sought, it is measurable because you know if you hit the goal or not, it is achievable assuming you have a culture focusing on people, it is relevant because ensuring a high percentage of engaged employees means optimized guest service (if employees are happy they will happily service the guests) and it is time-bound as it is a goal for the year.
That articulated goal should be shared with the highest levels of leadership. They then need to pass the goal to those within the departments over which they manage. Subordinate leaders should then ensure their smaller teams are aware of the goal – it should be talked about openly and transparently. The goal should be the subject of a pre-shift (if not multiple pre-shifts).
In addition to the “trickle-down messaging”, leadership needs to openly discuss the goal in large employee meetings so employees hear the same messaging from their direct managers along with key leaders of the organization.
The articulated and documented goals need to be printed on branded posters, placed on bulletin-boards or flashed via monitors periodically. They should be placed physically or electronically where any company messaging exists. The key is frequent visible exposure and frequent/repeated conversation. Repetition creates absorption, understanding and acceptance. Frequent sensory exposure fits our business, as our employees are tasked with maintaining inviting, comfortable spaces and providing exceptional service that provides wonderful smells, tastes, sounds and sights. We need to similarly “decorate” with our communications heightening the awareness of our people.
Frequent exposure fosters familiarity, making the goals a shared reality across all levels—from service workers to management.
As the goals trickle through the organization, each level needs to talk about “how” to make each goal a reality, thus leading to the next step in making things happen.
Step Two: Outline Steps to Accomplish Your Goals
Once you have your goals and you have broadly shared them, how do you meet them?
If we continue with the above example of increasing the engagement survey percentage score, steps must be taken to achieve that goal. This particular example is illustrative of the collaboration needed at a property or within a hospitality company. One might look at the priority and see it as an “HR thing”; thus it is someone else’s job. HR should spearhead the goal and ensure steps are determined and occurring; spearheading does not, however, mean that HR is doing everything.
In our example, HR should exercise its expertise and determine how to drive engagement scores higher. They should come up with initial steps in driving connectivity with staff – recognition events, pulse/pre-engagement surveys, action planning the results from the year before, holiday celebrations/contests – all of these steps should be “calendared” and planned for. There should be no surprises and minimal “pop up” steps to execution and accomplishment of a goal.
HR should hold planning sessions with other leaders and departments to see what they might add to the list of steps in driving up that score. All should collaboratively determine when things should occur and the calendaring of each of them.
Calendaring these steps can be grounding, especially in the often-unpredictable hospitality environment. Consistency becomes your fallback during busy or uncertain periods.
Once this roadmap of steps towards goal accomplishment is set, review them and fall back whenever you need to.
Step Three: Track, Mark, Communicate Accomplished Steps
Once the organization has the steps necessary to accomplish the goal along with stakeholders for each step, the next thing to do is track and mark each step. There are project management systems (ie. Monday.com) available to help record each step and provide a visualization as to progress. In the absence of a purchased system, an excel spreadsheet may work just fine. So long as you can record the steps and completion.
When steps are accomplished, it is important to communicate when they are done. At times, we can find ourselves in “ruts” at work – nothing will pull people out of “ruts” like proven accomplishment. Visual progress markers or dashboards are very helpful as they allow participants, stakeholders and leaders to “see” where they are, where they have been and where they are going.
Being able to share progress and how completed steps are leading towards achieving a priority will motivate one’s team and oneself. It also creates a general metric that can be provided to company leadership, boards or ownership groups – you can describe where you are in the achievement of certain priorities.
Step Four: Identify Stakeholders for Each Step
Taking the time to identify the steps is critical and helpful in keeping the company on course. While these steps should be collaborative, an organization should continue to maintain accountability and expectations. To do this, each step should have a stakeholder. This stakeholder is responsible for the implementation of the specific task/step at issue. Should there be an issue or concern with that task/step, they are the ones to approach.
The stakeholder is the “go to” and must ensure that the step is completed. However, it is far too simple to “blame” them should something go wrong. Better to view the stakeholder as someone with knowledge who can collaborate with others on the solution if the step is incomplete. A stakeholder’s success is interdependent with the team’s success.
Step Five: Celebrate Accomplishments
When dealing with teams, tracking the completion of accomplishments is no doubt of value. Some people (including the author) appreciate nothing more than the ability to check things off that perennial list.
Progress on a checklist, however, may not motivate everyone. When a team can complete steps/tasks that are of note, celebrate such completion! Encouraging an environment where every small step is towards one’s goal is meaningful. Whether it be donuts for the team in the morning or a quick “Teams Chat” complimenting everyone’s contributions, never let an achieved step go unrecognized. It has been said for years that recognition (how a company makes people feel) can be more valuable than money. Victor Lipman, in Psychology Today, noted that how you feel is often more important than what you earn (June 13, 2013).
Thus, each accomplishment deserves recognition, celebration and acknowledgement before moving to the next one. After all, we are paid to produce – each step is documented proof that that is exactly what the team is doing!
Step Six: Prepare the Story and Report the Wins (or Opportunities)
Your goals are in place, each step towards accomplishing the goals have been documented and are available for review. Each step has a stakeholder and as each step is completed, the team learns what happened and celebrates the completion. You can show anyone who needs to know the progress the team is making. The organization is moving forward in a steady, documented, illustrative manner.
As you approach the goals with the many documented steps, you have the making of a story. You can report the challenges that the team overcame or lay in front of you. You can talk through the “wins” made along the way and that lie in your future.
Going back to our engagement percentage improvement example, every step is a “people” story. One would imagine the steps including recognition events, holiday celebrations, implementation of suggestions, action planning from the prior year’s survey. Assuming one of the steps was implementing a suggestion – the source of the suggestion, along with how it was put into place, make for a powerful, descriptive narrative. The ability to tell the story allows you to share your production and progression – the fruits of your labor. By amplifying every success, even seemingly small contributions add to a rallying narrative within the organization. Everyone then marches, in unison, to the completion of the organization’s goals.
Conclusion
Vision is critical, but that is the mountain. Teams are in place to collaboratively figure how to climb that mountain. The steps for climbing need to be noted, documented, owned by someone and celebrated when made. Each documented, celebrated step is a foothold that brings the team closer to the summit.
Reaching the top of the mountain is the crescendo; the story is how the team gets to the top – each step it must take. Be prepared to tell that story as you go through this next year in a structured, strategic manner. Know the company’s goals (its mountain), plan how to get there and climb!
Reprinted from the Hotel Business Review with permission from www.HotelExecutive.com.
