HR Corner New focus on intellectual capital by Charles Mak Award-winning hotel trains staff in practical IT skills In an innovative and pioneering move, Langham Place Hotel, Mongkok has decided it should no longer have a human resources department. After a renaming exercise, it has instead a team focusing on intellectual capital and quality (IC&Q) and Ivy Leung, the department's director, stresses this was not something done just to be creative or simply for the sake of change. "It is a carefully thought out repositioning exercise for better human resources management," she says. In fact, the transformation came about after a thorough examination of the hotel's HR needs, plus in-depth analyses of its business positioning and, importantly, the progress of its TQM (total quality management) programme. "Our intellectual capital is the knowledge, experience and collective brainpower of the hotel's employees — or associates — guests and investors," Ms Leung explains. "The whole concept encapsulates how we generate and collect ideas, consolidate experience and knowledge, and align our business with customer expectations and feedback." She adds that the trend in HR is to recognise that the success of any enterprise comes not from its organisational structure and management practices, but from what staff have "inside". The success of a recent initiative to train what are known as guest support technologists (GSTs) clearly demonstrates this focus on developing intellectual capital. As one of Hong Kong's most technologically advanced hotels, Langham Place Hotel has a diverse range of high-tech facilities for guests, including wireless broadband connectivity, Cisco IP phones and even iHomes. To ensure there is adequate technical support at all times, special "High Yield GST" training programmes have been arranged for associates who are keen to learn and have volunteered to lend a hand whenever necessary. Intellectual capital and quality are interrelated New competencies According to Eddie Ho, concierge, the underlying idea is to develop the IT competencies of all associates, so as to fulfil the hotel's business needs and also achieve greater cost effectiveness. He notes that it has definitely had an impact and, in fact, helped the hotel to win this year's Hong Kong Management Association award for excellence in training. "Every hotel should develop IT capabilities, but setting up a specific department and assembling an IT team which is on 24-hour standby can be costly," says Mr Ho who presented details of the GST training at the HKIM award. "For example, if a 400-room hotel employs 10 IT staff who are divided into three shifts, each of them would need to take care of more than 100 guest rooms during an eight-hour shift. This simply wouldn't work because we cannot allow our guests, particularly business travellers, to wait if there is a problem getting a network connection." Assisting guests Meeting the need for instantaneous IT assistance, trained GSTs can now offer the necessary help in addition to handling their usual duties. "When our smart centre receives a request for assistance from a guest, GSTs are the first to respond, giving our business centre and IT specialists time to focus on more complicated matters," Mr Ho says. Ongoing knowledge transfer is an essential part of the programme. For example, monthly GST meetings give volunteers a chance to share their experiences and learn more about any day-to-day problems recently encountered. With IT now becoming such a vital part of the hotel business, Ms Leung points out that both generic and specialist knowledge should be viewed as an intellectual asset which must be supported by quality management. "Intellectual capital and quality are interrelated," she says. "That is why we have also included customer relations management and knowledge management in our TQM model." The core function of this model is to ensure the communication and consistent implementation of the hotel's values, mission and vision (VMV). "These serve as a backbone for the TQM programme and each decision we make must be aligned with our VMV," Ms Leung explains. "This helps all of us to work towards the same goals." Total Quality Management Langham Place Hotel has adopted the Malcolm Baldrige quality model as a guideline to evaluate its management practices against international standards. Ms Leung notes: "The philosophy behind this is that we outperform ourselves and take initiatives to communicate suggestions for continuous improvement to management. We have guidelines to follow, but to win in the marketplace, we need to think out of the box. This is a matter of attitude." All the hotel's managers have already taken full TQM training and over 400 associates have undergone TQM awareness training. Taken from Career Times 1 December 2006, p. A16 Your comments are welcome at [email protected]