Walk the Talk - Case 6a

Evan Marcuccio                                                                                   1196763

Case Paper (#3) “Walk the Talk”

In case 6-A: Walk the Talk, I believe the managers at the Florida resort hotel introduced an effective strategy for assuring high standards of customer service.  If a cash bonus is the result of a room cleaned to impeccable standards, then cleaner rooms would logically be the end result. However, the moral of the housekeeping staff would also be important to consider when implementing this strategy. If staff are held to unreasonable cleanliness standards during surprise inspections, and get a low bonus or even no bonus at all during each inspection, the staff may begin to have feelings of resentment for the manager and the inspections as a whole. This would lower overall cleanliness regardless of attempting to uphold and inforce a higher standard.  Another point to consider is the time required for a single staff member to clean a room.  If there are not enough staff present to clean rooms in a timely manner, and each member of the housekeeping staff is expected to clean rooms within a time restraint that is unreasonable while maintaining a high cleanliness standard, then the surprise inspections would do nothing to improve the cleanliness standard of the staff. However, if both the inspection standards and time restraints per room are enforced at a reasonable and comfortable standard, then the cleanliness of the housekeeping staff should be expected to rise as more surprise inspections are held.

        Question one in “Responding to the Case” asks us to refer to the steps of the control process and explain what part of the process the steps taken by the Florida Resort Hotel falls under.  I believe the steps taken by the Florida Resort Hotel fall mainly under step 3 of the control process, or Take Corrective Action.  The management saw that customer service needed to be improved and implemented a corrective action using the surprise inspection strategy. However, I also believe the corrective action used by the management is a real life representation of the entire control process itself laid out for the housekeeping staff in an easy to understand way. The strategy starts with steps one and two of the control process.  Step one involves measuring the actual performance of the cleanliness which is accomplished by the manager inspecting the room for cleanliness, and step two is accomplished by taking away a dollar bill each time performance standards are not met by the cleaning staff. The housekeeping staff are expected to accomplish steps three and four of the control process individually by taking corrective action and adjusting the way they clean each room when getting a low bonus left by the manager.