Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

holiday party in the ballroom of another local hotel. The Luxury Garden also produced a (more or less) quarterly newsletter, which announced the employees of the quarter and the year (who received cash awards) and mentioned employee and company news. Workers were encouraged to participate in committees, whose tasks included coming up with new ideas for bettering service (“to improve the ‘wow’ situation,” as Alice said in the orientation), addressing environmental issues within the hotel, and improving the food in the employee cafeteria.

      However, the sense of community also carried a dimension of accountability or coercion.²⁰ The language of many of the communications from upper management to workers often manifested two facets: one of community building and free choice, and the other of surveillance and compulsion. Typical of this attitude were the flyers posted around the back hallways of the hotel advertising a general assembly meeting; their tone promoted a fun, voluntary social activity (“Come enjoy refreshments!”), but at the bottom they stated baldly, “Attendance is mandatory.”

      Alice told me in an interview that the corporate culture, which she characterized as “pretty darn strong,” served to clarify expectations and weed out those who did not “fit in.” If employees did not observe these norms, she said, they would “stick out” and “feel out of place.” This meant that workers knew they could not shirk work and that if they brought friends in as employees, they knew the friends had to be good. Thus, Luxury Garden corporate culture was in part a culture of accountability; this culture also included elaborate standards and company surveillance.

      CORPORATE STANDARDS AND TRAINING The credo “Dignity, Excellence, Enchantment” codified broad standards of behavior; written in the first person, these standards also implied a certain kind of selfhood, telling the worker what kind of person to be. They included, for example: “I respect my guests’ and colleagues’ individuality.” “I show empathy.” “I listen actively.” “I keep my promises.” These are norms of personhood as well as behavior, conscripting the self in the service of the hotel's product and the guest's experience.

      Training sessions at the Luxury Garden, especially the orientation, encouraged workers to use strategies of deep acting to induce real feeling for guests.²¹ Much like trainers at the airlines Hochschild studied, managers told workers to “act like the hotel is your house” and to “pretend the [complaining] guest is a relative, so there's still a sense of caring.” This approach promotes deferential behavior “by invoking a familiar situation in which such behavior does not imply subservience.”²² Alice also told workers to “think about the hotel as if it were your business” when trying to solve a problem.

      Managers also suggested that making the guest feel better would benefit the worker herself. One video Alice showed in the orientation included a scene in which a worker relates to another worker a story (supposedly true) about a guest who arrived upset and treated the worker rudely. Although she was already having a bad day, the worker went out of her way for the guest, because she realized that he had been traveling for a long time and was tired. Afterward she felt good about having made the extra effort. At the end of the scene, her coworker comments, “So I guess by making his day, you made your day as well.” This video and other stories communicated that workers have to make allowances for people, because one never knows what has happened to them, and that the worker has the power to make someone feel better, which will benefit her psychologically too.

      Training also focused on specific ways to handle guest needs and complaints, which gave workers resources as well as standards to which they would be held accountable. In the orientation, we played the “customer service pyramid game,” for example, in which workers answered questions in nine categories of customer service (“Who ya gonna call?” “Service with a smile,” “Anticipation,” and so on). Alice showed a video that emphasized the importance of meeting the guest's needs in different interactive jobs. We also had training on guest complaints, which included statistics about repeat clients, psychological interpretations of guests’ underlying desires in situations when they complained, extensive role playing of unhappy guests, and five steps to handling guest complaints (“Don't interrupt,” “Apologize first,” “Identify the problem,” “Take immediate action,” and “Follow up”). This part of the training also included an animated video entitled A Complaint Is a Gift.²³

      The hotel also used more specific service standards developed at the company's head office, known as Celebrated Quality Standards (CQS). Binders containing dozens of standards were kept in each department. These included very specific ways of doing tasks in each department in the hotel, such as how many minutes it should take for the guest to check in (five) or when the worker should acknowledge the approaching guest (when he is fifteen feet away). These were not routines in the strictest sense, at least for interactive workers, because the workers had discretion about when to use them. But they were a sophisticated attempt to codify as many of the hotel's practices as possible. This program was accompanied by the Celebrated Standards Training, or CST. Alice told new workers that the CQS and the CST had been developed in order to maintain the high level of service “on so many continents.”

      TRAINING ON THE JOB Despite these elaborate standards, corporate culture was often more a matter of image than of practice. Training on the job was less elaborate than I had expected, given the emphasis on standards during the orientation. My own training from managers was somewhat spotty. When I first started, Antonio gave me a packet that included many of the relevant standards, but no one ever reviewed them with me. Training was inconsistent for other workers as well. Several workers told me they had simply been thrown into their jobs. Carolyn, Elena, and Patsy told me they had never been trained on the hotel's standards; Javier, a bellman who had been at the hotel for over a year, did not know that the red dot on the guest's key envelope indicated that the guest was a repeat. Max, who had helped to develop the guidelines, said, “No one ever uses them.”

      However, it was also clear that many workers had been trained very well, which may have depended on what department they were in and how long they had been with the hotel (those workers who had been through the original CQS “rollout” a few years before were more familiar with the standards). Luxury Garden workers seemed to get far fewer write-ups than those at the Royal Court, where discipline was used in place of training. Also, some attention was paid to ongoing training. During my time at the Luxury Garden, in addition to a two-day “etiquette training,” concierges, bellmen, and front desk agents attended a “guest services training,” the first in what François said might become a series. Managers also attended a training after which they had to solicit feedback from workers on topics such as recognition, career goals, and optimal working conditions.

      IMPLEMENTING NEW STANDARDS Corporate culture's multiple functions—promoting community and loyalty, demonstrating the impressiveness of the company, and establishing legitimate managerial authority and worker accountability—were illuminated in the “rollout” of a corporate-led initiative to modify the company's standards. The program, called Celebrated Quality Experience (CQE), was kicked off in a hotelwide meeting led by Sebastian, the general manager, about halfway through my time at the hotel. Workers gathered in a large meeting room decorated with yellow and red helium balloons and posters proclaiming the CQE. Before the meeting, workers were given numbered tickets. After calling workers to order, Sebastian said, “Those of you who know me know I like to give money away.” He drew a number and gave an envelope with fifty dollars in it to the housekeeping worker who waved the corresponding ticket as a human resources manager snapped their picture.

      Sebastian used a slick PowerPoint presentation to introduce the new program. He said that the CQS was becoming the CQE, a shift from over 1,000 “standards” to 175 “experiences.” He explained that the very specific Celebrated Quality Standards had proven unwieldy, because the company's various properties had constantly requested certain kinds of exemptions, needed because of the particular circumstances of each hotel. The U.S. properties, for example, could not implement standards that required excessive amounts of labor, which was much more expensive here than in Asia. The new standards would allow flexibility while retaining consistency among all the Luxury Garden properties worldwide. Sebastian said they also permitted a greater focus on interactions with guests, were more concise, and allowed each Luxury