These days I am reading Micah Solomon’s book ‘The Heart of Hospitality‘.
Although it is about the hotel business (e.g. Marriott International, The Ritz-Carlton Hotels & Resorts, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts), we as golf clubs and resorts should behave like hospitality companies.
Therefore, I thought some ideas can be implemented in our golf clubs as well.
I believe engaged employees have the most significant impact on the overall customer experience (CX) available at our golf club.
They have the most direct connection with our golf clubs’ guests and members.
Golf club employee experience & its impacts
When you think about customer experience innovation, you cannot neglect the importance of employee experience with your golf club (the importance of supplier experience is not less important, but this post is about employee experience).
Nowadays, more and more studies (e.g. Temkin Group, Gallup) are confirming the correlation between employee experience and success in customer experience and business performance.
Losing talent can be costly. Positive experiences and high engagement can minimize talent loss.
The research of the IBM Smarter Workforce Institute and Globoforce’s WorkHuman Research Institute found that employee experience and engagement are closely linked, reflecting employees’ states at work.
The successful employee experience innovation is affecting at least three areas of a golf club’s operations:
- Recruitment,
- Workforce retention,
- and of course the overall customer experience.
Yes, if a golf club is known as a super employer, it will attract many more applications. Our existing employees will be more likely to recommend our golf clubs where it is excellent to work.
The question is how to select the best possible candidates?
Hospitality Quotient
Gregg Patterson once recommended that I hire naturally happy people, as happy staff is key in the hospitality industry.
I agreed with him, but since then, I have been looking for a more sophisticated solution for selecting the best candidates.
This is how I found, partly thanks to Micah Solomon’s ‘The Heart of Hospitality’ book, Danny Meyer’s Hospitality Quotient concept.
Danny Meyer is a world-renowned restaurateur.
He is also known as the proprietor of Shake Shack. New Yorkers know him for his neighborhood restaurants, from Union Square Café to Gramercy Tavern.
He believes that six personality traits define an employee’s hospitality quotient.
By checking if the below-mentioned traits can be found in your candidates, you can get close to the ideal, future employees:
- Kindness & Optimism
- Intellectual Curiosity
- Work ethic
- Empathy: being able to resonate and connect with others is a powerful skill.
- Self-awareness: These self-aware employees may be having a bad day, but they can put it behind them and focus on their work.
- Integrity: a person with a high level of integrity is someone whom you can TRUST and RELY UPON.
I am not sure if the traits mentioned above can be taught. They may be honed and refined over time, but a candidate will not be able to pick up, for instance, intellectual curiosity or optimism.
Extra ideas for finding the best future employees
Just like in marketing, HR professionals should adopt the segmentation techniques to succeed in recruitment.
I would test (at least) to focus on such niche career sites and job boards that are for hospitality & restaurant job seekers.
Seek assessment solutions that are specifically tailored to golf clubs and resorts.
It is not a bad idea to create your own custom golf club benchmark. I am sure you have employees whom you consider the ideal employees.
Use their profiles as a benchmark for future recruitments.