Yang Haiyan, who comes from a military family, graduated from the Beijing Foreign Affairs School in 1980, and started his first job in life: a cashier. At the Shangri-La Hotel in Beijing, where he worked -- one of the first foreign-funded upscale hotels to enter China -- all the senior managers were foreigners, while basic jobs such as bellboys and waiters were filled by Chinese employees who had received short-term training. Yang Haiyan initially had no expectations, just wanted to do her job well and earn more money so she could have more options in the future.
But the next two decades of his career have far exceeded his expectations. Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts expanded rapidly in China, increasing the number of hotels to 21 in Hangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou, Xi'an and other parts of the country, and Haiyan Yang rose through the ranks as the group's business expanded, from finance to manager and director of various departments, such as front office, housekeeping and marketing, until 2005, when, at the age of 36, Haiyan Yang became the general manager of the Kerry Center Hotel in Beijing, the only one of the group's hotels to have been appointed to the position of general manager of the hotel. He became the only Chinese general manager in the group's hotels. "If possible, I hope to spend the next twenty, or even forty years of my working life here." he told Global Entrepreneur.
Yang Haiyan's experience seems to be a special case in the context of multinational hotel management groups that are increasing their efforts to develop the Chinese market to the point that they are short of senior management talent and have to poach from all over the world. But in his view, that's the norm at Kerry: Kerry has been in business for eight years, and there are more than 100 employees with eight years of experience, accounting for about one-sixth of the regular staff.
And a series of internal upgrading programs within the Shangri-La Group and Kerry Center are the reason why Yang is confident about the building of human resources," he says. --Through these programs, any employee can be trained and upgraded in different departments, and can also choose his or her next step according to his or her preferences, and communication with supervisors is usually kept within a relatively reasonable frequency, "We try not to make our employees feel the ceiling ", says Zhang Hongguang, Kerry's human resources director.
Encouragement-oriented
Beijing's Kerry Center Hotel and China World Hotel are located in the same core area of Beijing's CBD, close to each other, but their positioning is very different. The former serves a younger clientele, mostly from the IT, fashion and show business sectors, while the China World Hotel's clientele is almost exclusively high-end businesspeople, and the hotel's interior atmosphere is solemn. With this positioning, Kerry's staff is also predominantly young, with an average age of between 25 and 26.
This makes human resource management difficult. After all, the hotel industry places more emphasis on service experience, which requires a long period of work experience. For Kerry's employees, it was clear that maturing them in a short period of time was not a realistic option. Yang Haiyan was also plagued by this problem for a while, and his solution was to focus on encouraging his staff. "In the past, if someone did ten things, nine right and one wrong, you needed to harshly criticize why they did it wrong; but now you have to praise the nine things that went right." The effect of this is to get young people to be more motivated and creative, which in a way also makes up for inexperience.
An example of this is a time when Yang Haiyan was discussing a pricing plan for a dish with the manager of the catering department and a few staff members. Since the dish had been very popular since it was introduced, and the frequency with which it had been ordered had quickly increased over a three-month period, Yang and the manager thought that since it was so popular, it didn't matter if they raised the price, as the guests shouldn't care about the money. But the staff disagreed, as they did not want to see the frequency of ordering decrease because of the price. Both sides argued for a long time, and finally Yang Haiyan agreed to the staff's request and encouraged them to be bold and follow their own way. In the past, it was the managers who set the policy and let the young staff do it.
In fact, this encouragement is not only in the decisions made beforehand. In normal communication, Kerry's managers and staff have various opportunities to interact, such as regular meetings every morning, weekly staff dialogues, in addition to annual general meetings attended by all staff twice a year, all of which encourage free speech and respect and praise young people's opinions.
And after the fact, if an employee achieves a good result, Kerry will do everything possible to recognize it. For front-of-house staff, Kerry has a "guest delight program"; for back-of-house staff, the rewards program is called "Heroes Behind the Scenes". At the end of the year, there is also an award for employee of the year.
In May of this year, Guardian International Auctions had an auction at Kerry. Previously, because of the venue, Guardian had once intended to change the venue, but a sales manager at Kerry constantly communicated with Guardian and put forward a number of solutions, working overtime every day for a week, and ultimately won this big order from Guardian. After the auction, as the next day happened to be Mother's Day, Yang Haiyan planned an original incentive. He ordered a big cake and gave it to the sales manager's mother in the name of Kerry, and the sales manager was so excited that she burst into tears when she came to work.
Succession planning
Like many top-tier multinational hotel management groups, Kerry has been able to capitalize on talent synergies with other sister hotels in the group. Shangri-La's business model is also unique in that it owns or joint ventures 90 percent of its hotels in China, making it both an owner and a manager, whereas most other multinational hotel management groups are only managers, and so it has been able to develop a more long-term talent training and development program.
This is particularly important for Kerry, as it maximizes the possibility of eliminating the "ceiling" for employees, which means more room for advancement and more choices for younger employees who are more willing to stay with Kerry. Although Kerry's remuneration packages are not the highest in the industry, the Group's remuneration package for Yang Haiyan is not the highest in the industry. In fact, one of the indicators in the group's assessment of Yang Haiyan is training. As the hotel's general manager, he must set aside a certain amount of money each year for training, which includes corporate culture, skills and other comprehensive cross-training programs.
And at the group level, the Shangri-La Management Academy was established in December 2004 in Langfang. The Academy's programs include Culinary Arts, Food and Beverage Services, Front Office Operations, Housekeeping Operations, Laundry Operations, Engineering Operations, Training and Development, and Human Resource Management. After receiving their certificates, the trained personnel are assigned to work in the Group's hotels across the country according to their needs.
Shangri-La has also partnered with Cornell University to offer an online program (E-CornellProgram). Anyone interested in furthering their education can go online and take courses offered by Cornell University's Johnson School of Management, School of Hotel Administration, and School of Industrial and Labor Relations, which are divided into five categories: human resource management, management overview, hotel and food service management, strategic management and financial management. Upon completion of the program, students will receive a certificate from Cornell University.
Additionally, for managers, there is the Group Training Village, where employees of any hotel, including Kerry, who have been identified as future leaders are given six months to train in various departments within the hotel, and then transferred to other hotels within the group for training, followed by training at the Group Training Village. After two to three years, he or she will become a senior manager within the group.
Additionally, if an employee encounters a "ceiling" at his or her hotel, he or she will be able to realize a new career path through the Group's internal human resources deployment.
These measures have added to Kerry's success in the battle for talent in multinational hotels, where not only is the turnover rate lower than the industry average, but also many of the management staff come from within, with 80-90 percent of managers starting at the grassroots level, according to Kerry's figures. "I believe every employee has the opportunity to work their way up from the grassroots to senior management, just like me." Yang Haiyan said.