How staff empowerment led to The Langham, HK earning a 5-star rating

Susan Lee, learning and development manager at The Langham, Hong Kong shares how the HR team empowers employees through training.

The Langham Hospitality Group implemented a new vision – to be recognised as the leading and visionary hospitality group in the world by offering unique brands for different market segments and building guest loyalty.

Therefore, we went through a repositioning plan to become one of the finest luxury hotels in Hong Kong. The human resources team played a key role in communicating the new mission statement and contributing to the success of this goal.

One of the critical success factors of becoming a leading hotel is having a robust system in place to raise and sustain guest service, retain and develop talents, continuously maximise efficiency, and ultimately build business performance.

In order to enhance our systems and work process, we empowered the employees to be involved in the daily improvements through our “Langham Logic Project”.

Each department identifies one project every year to improve their work efficiency, service standard and solve reoccurring problems. The project was lead by different department heads and general colleagues and supervisors were grouped into teams. The different groups had to source out troubleshooting areas, then find solutions and execute change.

To ensure service consistency, we developed a SOP Circle, which is an electronic platform to maintain all 280 Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for each position.

It records the level of competency for each colleague. To benchmark ourselves with the best, we enrolled to be anonymously audited by different third parties to ensure our service standards and quality products were consistent throughout.

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Service culture is equally important to raise the overall standards. The human resources department were involved in developing training programmes and reinforcing key messages to ensure the right skill-set were applied in the operations.

The learning progress was also monitored by reviewing the quality of service and taking necessary action to ensure the performance gap was closed.

For example, all colleagues were taught to fully comprehend the new vision, mission and values through our 5Ms Programme. 5Ms stand for: My Brand, My Hotel, My Guest, My Colleague and My Self.

Through the 5Ms programme, staff were taught to apply the hotel values (VMV) through daily work.

To ensure colleagues were familiar with the VMV, each section conducted their daily briefing called “Showtime” to share the VMV and each colleague were invited to share their own experience to express the value of the day. This is an excellent platform to reinforce the values, share the best practice and enhance the service culture.

Enabling colleagues to deliver personalised service, every staff member attended two days of passion service training which covers knowing our guest, how to deliver genuine service, service with poise, turning oops with wow and service leadership.

With our continuous commitment for service excellence and the support of our training initiatives, awareness campaigns and process review, we engaged with every colleague at The Langham, Hong Kong to work together as a team and be one of the leading hotels in town.

As a result, we’re now amongst the top 115 hotels in the world and one of eight properties in Hong Kong to earn the prestigious Forbes Five-Star rating.

In addition, our restaurant T’ang Court won the much coveted Three Michelin Stars in the 2016 Michelin Guide, Hong Kong and Macau. T’ang Court was the only restaurant to move up to three stars and now one of three Cantonese restaurants in the world to achieve this accomplishment.

These results highlight our colleagues’ contribution and commitment. We’ll continue to focus on our objectives to increase guest satisfaction scores and business performance to uphold the company’s success.

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