Case 3.

Portman Hotel

Section I: Problem Statement

This case contains information on Portmans strategy and business model, HR systems and practices, and the performance of a crucial group of employees, the personal valets. The plan is not working and expectations of various internal stakeholders are not being realized. The major problem faced by the vice president and managing director , Patrick Mene was to bail out the company from current state of employee dissatisfaction through strategic human resource management to provide best customer service and increase the profits for the company .

SWOT Analysis Strengths

Service- The philosophy of the hotel emphasized on high quality but cost effective service Selection- Hotel recruited very selectively and demanded long term commitment from the employees. Employee value- Each of the employees was considered to be precious and elaborate employee rights were listed in contracts with them and demanded long term commitment from the employees. Guest value- Key strategy of providing special personal service to guests with no rules for guests. No Unions- Except for a few engineers, none of the employees had joined any of the unions. Occupancy-Low occupancy of rooms created problems for a effective service team Employee distribution- The strategy of the hotel to cut down on the middle management and put more employees at the guest front proved to be wrong as there was lack of proper supervision for the lower level employees. Interpersonal issues-There was lack of coordination and trust among various groups of employees and their interpersonal relations were going bad.

Weakness
Job allocation- random allocation of the employees at various jobs led to disorder while dealing with the hotel guests.

Opportunities
Differentiation- There was product differentiation through the service provided

Threats
Personalised service could increase the costs of the hotel in long run in case the

Group D Divya Reddy, Ganesh Kamath, Manichand V, Rangoli Garg, Urvashi Bakhru

Case 3. Portman Hotel to the customer. Customer insight- The employees were trained to identify the loyal customers and rejecters and hence had customer insight which could be put to use by providing better service. cost of labour increased beyond expectations. unionisation in case the management gets to tough with the employees. It was possible that guests may object to the fact that the same person performing two types of service, say room cleaning and serving.

Section II: Detailed Analysis of the Problem

Although the hotel came up with a 5 star team plan but due to low occupancy , Floaters were employed to save on the costs, based on the requirement of each floor. Also loyalty and customer relationship became another major issue with the employment of floaters as they were not able to relate with them. The company does not seem to have a clear set of HR policies pertaining to the job structure of Personal Valets who end up doing more work. Due to the conflict in their job description they spend most of their time cleaning . The work structure created a situation where the personal valet cleaning a bathroom had to attend the other guests in a sweaty and smelly condition. As some of the employees were let go during less occupancy, the company were forced to recruit more people during busier periods. This resulted in additional expenditure in imparting training to the employees. The Portman Hotel did not have a system in place for disciplining the poor performers. They believed that discipline was contradictory to the hotel philosophy and hence followed a 3 warning system which resulted in less accountability on the part of the PVs and degraded the service quality. The lack of trust amongst the PVs and floaters created conflict between them and PV believed that the floaters were there to steal their tips whereas the floaters were unable to earn higher tips as they were unable to make relationships with the guests.

Section III : Alternative Solutions

One option will be to proceed with the proposition of team captain to address the problem of co-ordination and compromise with the philosophy of No hierarchy. This would reduce Group D Divya Reddy, Ganesh Kamath, Manichand V, Rangoli Garg, Urvashi Bakhru

Case 3. Portman Hotel the load on the HR and could improve the situation to a great extent as the HR could focus on the major problems rather than handling petty issues. Second option would be to increase the employee motivation and trust by involving them in team building exercise. This would increase the interdependency of the employees and commitment. The third option would be to abandon the concept of personal valet as it is evident that the Americans are yet not ready for this kind of service and revert to the traditional way of American hospitality.

Section IV: Recommendations

We would recommend that the hierarchy level should be increased which will not only will enable the supervisor to monitor and control things in a better way but also it will be an incentive for the PVs to get promoted to a higher level. This option has to be complemented with certain other measures of increasing motivation and commitment through specific training to be imparted to all the employees of the hotel which will increase the coordination and result in better productivity.

Group D Divya Reddy, Ganesh Kamath, Manichand V, Rangoli Garg, Urvashi Bakhru