Ritz Carlton Case Study

MIS 714 – Service Innovation

Professor Michael zur Muehlen

Case Analysis 1 – Ritz Carlton

Romulo Gabriel

The article is about how Ritz-Hilton Hotels implement its culture to the employees in a new luxury hotel.

The Ritz-Hilton hotels is a traditional chain in the hospitability business. Along its history, mainly because market changes, it migrates from manage their own hotels to manage properties of others players on the hospitality business. Ritz-Hilton make profit charging fees over the properties’ revenue that managed by them. Its mainly customers groups are independent travelers and meeting event players.

The company has two aspects that help to define their world famous and recognized excellence: its operational process performance and its Human Resources practices.

Regarding its operational process, they won two Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, honor dedicated to organizations which have excellence in Total Quality Management (TQM) practices. Through the believe of its chief quality officer, who used the Award as pillar, they implement new activities and measures that guided the company to built a solid path in the TQM practices. Examples of these activities and measures are: cost of poor quality, continuous improvement, quality planning, benchmarking, supplier certification, and quality audits.

Although this great operational performance, the aspect that mainly characterizes the Ritz-Carlton is its Human Resources. Its part of the company’s culture treats the employees as its most valuable asset. Since the total respect for the human being, going through proper training and performance rewards, till make clear that employees are part of the business as a whole and they have total freedom to promote improvements, Ritz-Carlton create a culture commitment and sharing rarely seen in any kind of industry.

Therefore, the challenge for the company was implement this culture in a new opening business. It is mentioned in the article that teach this to new employees in an open-running business was easier because they would be inserted in a place where the “hotel atmosphere” already had the Ritz-Hilton culture. In the other hand, in the new luxury hotel, was necessary build this atmosphere from ground, just like the hotel walls. In order to beat this challenge, Ritz-Hilton had a hotel-opening training process called The Seven Day Countdown.

The Seven Day Countdown was a week long training for all employees where “The first two days were devoted entirely to orienting employees to The Ritz- Carlton culture and values, while the remaining five days involved more specific skills training and trial runs of service delivery”. I identified two main goals in the training: teach the employees that their goal was sell service and implement deep and hard the self-awareness and continuous improvement culture.

The service philosophy, which came together with the Gold Standards “were reinforced daily through departmental “lineups,” which occurred at the beginning of every shift, in every hotel, around the world.  They were used to reinforce the company’s philosophy and to repeat the foundation of the business over and over in order to build the habits necessary for employees to deliver the highest  level  of  service  demanded  by  The  Ritz-Carlton”. During this training, employees were “Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen”, and together with this motto they ended learning that the organizations value and respect their employees.