Before anything was designed, we listened. Six General Managers, two owners, corporate finance and sales, and your own leadership, between July and September. These are their words, not ours; designations only, no names.
Seven conversations across the estate, from the hotels that build the pack to the owners who receive it.
“It was maybe 20 slides to start with, and then every meeting people ask for additional information... now the deck is so big that I think nobody actually opens it anymore.”
“We normally reach slide 15 of 80, and then the time was up.”
“I have to assume probably 10 to 20 hours of management time... it's quite an expensive report.”
“It's not really logical to spend between one week and ten days preparing slides for historical data.”
“Most of the processes are manual... I have to copy-paste a screenshot of an Excel document into a PowerPoint and then make the comments manually.”
“There's a lot of manual entering that we need to do that actually takes about two days.”
“I'm not comfortable with this presentation... we spend maybe three hours to four hours, and from my owner perspective I need maybe five or six or ten slides.”
“What is the situation compared to last year, compared to the budget, and why we cannot attain the budget?”
“The three, the six coming months... Because the past, it's over. It's done.”
“A vast majority of the hotels are not ready before the 15th or even 20th of the month, so that is when the problem starts.”
“Yeah, 10th is okay, but right now we are not even achieving 10th. We are doing 15th actually.”
“The business review is not to put together numbers. Numbers everybody will get. But to tell the story behind the numbers.”
“In this age of AI, why do we need to convert anything into PowerPoint? Why is there not a possibility that we can host it on a site?”
“We want the business review to go to the owner clear enough that they don't want to do a call to ask questions.”
What it told us. The pack has grown by accretion and is built by hand. It leaves the hotel late, reaches the owner later, and is read least by the people it is for. Owners want fewer pages, the comparison, the reason for the gap, and the months ahead. That is what the three drafts are built around.
First the General Managers, on the standards they receive; then the people who own the library and will run the engine.
“When you receive SOPs and it's so big, it's decoration, or it cannot help people to read it.”
“This SOP was available in 1999, but now we have no assistant GM, no need for record. We have the email.”
“My point is to really reconsider and rethink all the SOPs, facilitate them, make it easy for people.”
“Then we can make training on the SOPs, and after that follow up whether the SOPs were implemented or not.”
“SOPs should be here, but at the same time we need to give some margin to the staff... because we are human and we are in a human industry.”
“We gave front office written SOPs, and it's trained and retrained. So we saw our guest comments go up. The consistency on how things are being done.”
“All the properties are so vastly different that specific SOPs must be written... but a lot will also be generic, hospitality-wise.”
“We are drilled on the brand standards more than drilled on SOPs.”
“We don't change anything major, but we try to tailor-fit our SOPs to be operationally fit with our departments and our country.”
“We usually receive the SOPs in a very generic format because it's a regional one, and we customise it according to the culture here, the labour law and the country regulations.”
“These SOPs are copied and recopied, and recopied again. So nobody invented them.”
“I don't want them just copy-paste for both, I want them tailor-made.”
“The SOPs on file are rather more systemic... an action-based tick box. Did you answer in three rings? Did you say good morning?”
“We're a white-label management company. The general question we're getting asked is: where are your SOPs?”
“15 to 20% of the SOP needs to be fully adaptable to the property or the brand, and the rest could be more generic.”
“We do not want to give them the blanket authority of just rewriting an SOP and leaving it... there has to be a governance of these documents.”
“The objective is to build the factory.”
“These SOPs are only as good as to what extent they can be translated in the field and actually deployed and delivered through the different departments.”
“Our deadline is end of November to have everything in place, all categories... to prepare for the season.”
“I would only be changing or reviewing them annually... if we keep moving the goalposts, it's not fair on them.”
What it told us. From the hotels: the library arrives too big to read, out of date in places, and is tailored by hand at every property; where a standard is short, trained and followed up, it works. From the centre: the library is generic and inherited; the property is missing from it. It must fit each hotel, in English and French, be governed from the centre, hold for a year, and be in place for the November season. Above all, it must be a method Aleph runs itself. That is what the engine is.
“We wanted that single source of truth, one repository that any of our people from any of our hotels could log into and get the latest version.”
“If I have access to this platform, which is an intranet, a website, what happens at the back end is not the problem of the user.”
“As simple as it can be.”
Now, where we stand.