Background
The Park Lane Hotel is a luxury business hotel overlooking Green Park in Piccadilly, London. It is part of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, headquartered in White Plains, New York. Starwood’s portfolio includes over 900 hotels and its best known brands include Sheraton, Luxury Collection, Westin, W Hotels and Le Meridien.
The Park Lane Hotel has over 300 bedrooms with extensive conference and banqueting facilities. Some 250 staff are employed at the Park Lane with the largest numbers in dining, food and beverage and housekeeping. The Park Lane is also the home of the complex support services (sales, reservations, human resources, finance) for two other Starwood luxury hotels in London. About 80% of associates are non-UK nationals, with a particularly heavy concentration of Eastern European origin. Many of the staff are new to the hospitality industry; however their willingness to apply their effort means that training can proceed on the assumption that there is a positive attitude to learning opportunities.
Training provision and learning technology
Christian Nikles is the Learning and Development Manager for Starwood Central London Hotels based at The Park Lane Hotel. He describes his major challenge as managing the cost of training, particularly operating within budget. In an environment where immediate operational decisions predominate there is always a risk of training for the long-term being squeezed out if resources are tight. Christian Nikles faces similar pressure in his job role: there is a danger of spending too much of his time on day-to-day administration and insufficient time on developing and implementing new initiatives and processes.
In the hospitality industry, training and learning is most effective when it takes place in the workplace. Every department at The Park Lane Hotel has a departmental trainer. He or she is responsible for the induction of new staff and the immediate identification of training needs. This is a prestigious role, though it does not carry additional direct remuneration. The departmental trainers meet monthly under Christian Nikles’ leadership.
For some time e-learning has been a feature of training and learning provision at The Park Lane Hotel. All staff access modules available through the Starwood Development Centre which has been available for around seven years. This contains a library of e-learning courses from basic skills through to high level business strategy courses from Cornell University. Certain modules, which are bespoke courses for Starwood for example relating to ethics and compliance are mandatory for designated staff.
A particularly interesting e-learning initiative is a two month course which has been developed in partnership with The Hague University. This is aimed at management level and currently there is one Assistant Manager at Park Lane enrolled, although another six have been through the module. There is no face-to-face classroom element to this course. Participants work through a series of modules (for example revenue management, front-office management, and e-commerce). They are also expected to participate in chat-room discussions and contribute to a ‘blog’ that outlines their own learning activities.
The use of webinars
A webinar is a term that has emerged to describe a specific type of web conference. In a web conference a participant sits at his or her PC and is connected to other participants, synchronously (or on real time) via the internet. A web conference can be used for a variety of purposes, including conferencing or communication which need not involve an element of individual learning. A webinar typically involves a presentation from an expert speaker to an audience. Participants can be polled online to gain their views or test their understanding and can ask questions using an online email facility. In most of the current technologies the speaker uses PowerPoint slides for his or her presentation and there is voice-over audio on the users’ PC.
Webinars are a growing feature of communication and learning at Starwood Hotels & Resorts. Some 50 managers and associates at The Park Lane Hotel will participate in a company-wide webinar in the course of a year. Typically a session will last about 60 minutes. Some webinars pass on updates and information on new procedures; others have a more distinct learning element.
Anne Marie Zammit Lupi is responsible for the Kaizen quality and productivity improvement processes for the London hotels. She is a Six Sigma ‘black-belt’ and participates every quarter in a webinar involving her ten fellow European project leaders. The expert presenter can be based anywhere in the world and the most recent webinar was delivered from Brussels. The main advantage of this mode of delivery is clear. It allows people to communicate without the need to travel. As such it is very cost effective. Anne Marie Zammit Lupi finds the technology is now sufficiently reliable not to act as a barrier or deterrent. There is a back-up telephone conferencing number to allow participants to hear the commentary without the need to reply on voice over on their PC. She does however feel that there are some issues with the webinars which do not arise in face-to-face sessions.
The most obvious example is the inability to gauge participants’ reactions from their body language. More generally it is impossible to see what participants are doing (and indeed whether they are involved at all). Some people may be more reluctant to contribute by writing a comment than others – but equally the emphasis on the written text may allow people more time to reflect. All webinars are recorded for people who are unable to participate or wish to revisit the presentation.
Anne Marie Zammit Lupi makes the following observation:
“It is interesting that so far we have not introduced training on how to deliver a webinar. By contrast we put a lot of effort into effective classroom delivery. Webinar presenters have to learn by practice on the style of slides, timing of delivery and engagement of participants”
Nevertheless the use of webinars is likely to grow for learning at senior levels over the next few years.