The Portman Hotel Company

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Case Analysis: The Portman Hotel Company

Presented by,

Group AN2

Ankit Tripathi 15S706

Keerthan R 15S723

S S N Chandrika 15S749

Swati S Giri 15S753

Problem statement

In what ways can the Portman hotel company restructure its working methodologies, set clear direction for its employees to retain the POD in implementing Asian hospitality and to achieve motto of - maximize service while minimizing management over-head.

 Organization Background

The Portman hotel was to be the first to be names after world famous architect designer and developer of luxury hotels, who also owned it. The hotel was relatively small with 348 rooms and 21 floors.

 The objective of the organization was to bring in the Asian hospitality to the US. It revolutionized the guest service by appointing personal valets (PVs), for every customer, to provide comprehensive personal service. PVs also proved to be the key competitive difference for the hotel.

Human resource management system believed in having a flat hierarchy. It called its each employee an associate. There were bill of rights – to assure every associate of his/her rights which could be claimed legally, if in case need be. Unions were discouraged as they hoped that Bill of Rights were sufficient to protect the rights.

There were well protected human rights. The hotel had its own unique yet stringent system of hiring people. Only most talented people were hired - artists, entrepreneurs, writers to fill up the post of associates. They were the pioneers in providing personal valets to assist each of its customer 24*7. They didn’t believe in having special employees for room cleaning, or ironing etc. Instead trivial work and issues were majorly handled by the PVs.

Critical factors:

• Organizational structure: There was a lack of hierarchy in in the organization and most of the associates were given the work that they couldn’t handle. Decentralization led to disorganized work culture. There was no central head who could be approached by PVs in at the times of chaos.
• Lack of Supervisors: There was too much of confidence placed into the hands of the inexperienced PVs. There were only 5 supervisors for about 80 PVs who were mostly young – 80% were below 35.
• Lack of issue resolution channels: This was a major result of inconsistency of the leader himself. There was no proper delegation of power and directions to the PVs weren’t well laid out, yet there’s was an expectation of smooth flow of work without any glitches.
• Lack of knowledge on tips culture: Actual amount was about $ 40 per week instead of the expected $200. American customers were unfamiliar with the concept of Personal Valets and didn’t know how much to tip.
• Job content: The expected work distribution was 50% cleaning and 50% serving. But due to work overload, many a times, PVs were stuck at cleaning 80% of the times and they serviced the guests for only about 20% of the times.
  Also sometimes PVs were looked down upon their work.
• Employee relations: PVs felt that the other employee treated them like maids. Also the employee though trained for the PV job couldn’t have done his job any better due to the lack of soft skills.

Entry court, room service, and receptionist – it’s all departmentalized. Working    with other groups proved to be a problem. Some of the PVs left because of the persistence of the existing problems.

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