Hospitality businesses thrive or die on the success of their brand. But branding is not just about design or personality - it's about delivery. What you promise for your guests must be reliably and consistently delivered every time.
To achieve this, you first require a clear framework that aligns process with values. Having this allows you to do two things: to evaluate performance against the framework, but also to match learning to it.
Learning takes place all the time, especially in hospitality where roles are very hands-on. But you can split it into three main areas (before, during and after a guest experience), each of which requires a slightly different approach.
Learning that takes place before a guest experience is likely to be the most structured in terms of content. Increasingly, learning is being consumed electronically - sometimes in the form of content that is pushed out to users based on their job, but in more enlightened organisations the content is of a quality that encourages users to seek it out (video is a good example of this). There is still a case for practical face-to-face sessions and observations to reinforce role-based scenarios. But all planned training content needs to be engaging, and it helps to include an element of gamification in all learning.
Learning during an experience is all about being alert and attentive - recognising body language and working out what has the most positive impact. But it is also about drawing on the things you have learned previously to recognise and prepare for different situations.
And after an experience, the richest resource, when you can get it, is feedback from your guests.
If you have more than a handful of sites, then making all this happen will require some administration. And that's where a good Learning Management System (such as GEMacademy) comes in. Being able to host your own learning content, blend it with different types and sources of training, track the results, wrap it in your own brand identity, and nudge people with notifications, means that delivering your brand promise consistently both happens in the first place and is economical in the amount of human resource required to support it.
